Taking Fellowships Digital

Lauren Davis

In 2019 the Clements introduced a new Digital Fellowship, where we scan a collection identified by our fellow for them to consult from their home institution. Imagined well before the public health challenges presented to us by the coronavirus, it now stands as a model for how we can still work to support researchers even if they can’t travel to our reading room. Our inaugural Digital Fellow, Lauren Davis, a doctoral candidate at the University of Rochester’s History Department, talked to us about her project and the power of remote historical research. The transcript of our conversation appears below, condensed and edited slightly.

—Jayne Ptolemy
Assistant Curator of Manuscripts

Jayne Ptolemy (JP): Tell us about your project and the types of sources you use to uncover your story.

Lauren Davis (LD): My dissertation is entitled “Beyond Institutions: Mental Disorders and the Family in New York, 1830-1900,” and it explores how families cared for relatives with mental illness in the 19th century. I found that nuclear and extended families were taking part in a lot of home caregiving, were helping to make healthcare decisions, and were negotiating patients’ treatment with physicians when they felt like institutionalization was necessary. Despite families directing every stage of mental health treatment, the history of mental health is dominated by a focus on institutions and prominent physicians. My dissertation restores families to the narrative of mental health care, establishes a lay perspective on diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and contributes to the history of gender at the intersection of medicine. It challenges the existing interpretations of American asylums as the first and last resort for mental health care.

There’s a pretty wide variety in the sources that I’m using. I use a lot of family correspondence and diaries, which give me the most qualitative information about a particular caregiving situation. Families are seeking cures for their relatives, and if a cure or improvement doesn’t seem like it’s possible, then they want to provide the best long-range care that they can. Sometimes they choose an institution, but a lot of times they rely on home care. This isn’t necessarily a situation where someone is institutionalized and then stays there for the rest of their lives. A lot of times they’re institutionalized for a period, and then after a few years they determine that they’ve received the most benefit that can be achieved and they will be pulled back out of the institution. They return home and live with their family supporting their care.

(JP): Which Clements collection are you working with, and why did you select it?

(LD): I’m working with the King Family Papers. I’m interested in the declining mental health of William King and his brothers’ efforts to care for him. The King family correspondence includes discussions of his brothers’ direct interventions, consultations with physicians, and their commitment of William to a private insane asylum. I’m interested in seeing why the brothers decided to commit William, how they selected an institution, if they thought he was curable and if that changed over time, and how they negotiated his care with physicians when they thought it was appropriate to consult with them.

This July 31, 1870, letter details Edward King’s struggles to contend with his brother William’s declining mental health. The handwriting itself seems to reveal the agonizing emotional turmoil and the inadequacy of words to describe a family’s calamity.

(JP): How is working from digital surrogates different from researching in-person at a library? What challenges and benefits does it yield?

(LD): I thought about this in two different ways. First, when I’m researching in person, I’m able to browse across multiple collections, and I can see what might be relevant to my project. This is hard to replace without having digital options available for all the same materials. When I have digital images for a whole collection, though, it is an advantage for my research. When I’m working with family papers, the narrative threads run through many of the family letters. The dynamics of relationships within every family are unique, and the outlook a person has on caregiving is not isolated from the rest of these relationships. Having the time to explore the context of surrounding letters in a collection is vital for understanding this.

The other side that I thought about is in terms of reading the text. With high quality images, researchers now can manipulate the image by zooming in or adjusting the contrast. Those are things that make the text clearer in ways that’s not possible with a physical manuscript. It’s also a lot easier to ask about a particularly tricky word if you have a digital image you’re able to share with a colleague. My friends and I send screenshots, asking each other, “What do you think this word is?”

(JP): From a researcher’s perspective, what is the value of digital fellowships that don’t have a residency requirement, even without a global pandemic?

(LD): The pandemic definitely has changed the perspective and outlook on digital fellowships, but one of the largest benefits at any point is being able to process the collection at home, on my own timeline. A visit to an archive provides advantages, but it also requires resources to allow for travel and multiple days spent in a reading room. Any time I travel to an archive I try to be as efficient as I can, so I’m using my time to gather the most helpful information as quickly as possible. That means making a lot of judgments on what’s the most relevant and important. Sometimes these decisions are clear, but sometimes they’re more ambiguous, or new details alter my conclusions. In one case, after I read a few dozen letters, I discovered that a family friend often interacted with an institutionalized relative. By having images of that collection I was able to go back and consult the material again to follow the different paths and clarify points of ambiguity. Being able to consult the images as your research evolves is very helpful.

Sometimes it’s just one line about one person that helps piece together the narrative, and it may not come up until ten years after the specific time period of their care. With family letters, it’s key to have the surrounding context. It takes a long time to process them, so being able to do that digitally is a big benefit for me.

(JP): What main lessons has researching in the age of COVID taught you?

(LD): I think the biggest thing is having to be flexible to navigate the changes the pandemic has brought. I had plans to visit several archives in the spring of 2020. All the facilities closed to visitors, so that’s been impossible. I have had to adjust, use what I have, and be creative about what I’m able to access. Before the pandemic I’d actually never worked with microfilm. I had always had better alternatives, either using the manuscripts or better quality digital images. I had a particular set of volumes, where the reading room was closed and I couldn’t visit that archive. They had microfilm they could send via Interlibrary Loan, so I was able to process it at my university’s library and work my way through the sixteen volume series. It was a new experience for me, but it worked! Flexibility is the biggest thing, having to be creative and rethinking plans about how to get as much information as I can.

Much like Lauren, we’ve found that this challenging season has taught us the resounding power of being flexible and harnessing the resources at our disposal. Zoom conversations with fellows, high resolution scans, reference photos taken with cell phones—in ways big and small, we have been using technology and digital surrogates to support innovative research like Lauren’s from a distance. Until we’re once again able to crowd around the tea table with all our fellows to discuss their archival finds of the day, we’ll continue to look to the power of technology to keep us connected and moving forward.