Project

Photogrammar: Seeing and Hearing America’s Documentary Record

Program

ACLS Digital Extension Grants

Department

American Studies, Film & Media Studies, and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Abstract

Principal Investigator. Project Team: Taylor Arnold, Catherine DeRose, Monica Ong Reed, and Lauren Tilton, Yale University; Courtney Rivard, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Photogrammar: Seeing and Hearing America’s Documentary Record will enhance two areas of the web-based digital and public humanities platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. Photogrammar will place the collection in the larger federal effort to document America during the era by creating links across archives. We are incorporating the Federal Writers Project and bringing together over 4,000 life histories from UNC and the Library of Congress. Photogrammar also will expand knowledge about photographers by adding oral histories (over 20 hours) that were conducted by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and rebuilding the photographer’s film rolls.