First Impressions of Early Women Photographers in Connecticut

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Since Lee and I moved to Connecticut, we have been doing more research on early women artisan photographers here. One thing that has been striking is our impression that there are fewer women professional photographers here than in other states where we have already done more research, like Kansas and Massachusetts. We have wondered whether that impression was justified, or whether we were influenced by the amount of information available for Kansas (many online newspapers) and Massachusetts (the Steele and Polito compilation of 19th century photographers). To see whether Connecticut really had fewer early women photographers, I decided to look at Census data.

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Caroline Crane Marsh diaries available

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In thinking about the Alphabetical Diaries, I ended up exploring two other notable diaries. One is by Julia Wilbur, and is featured on my simulacrum of the Alphabetical Diaries. The other diary is by Caroline Crane Marsh (CCM), the American ambassadress (wife of the American ambassador) in Italy, for the period 1861-1865. I was so taken with CCM’s diaries that I decided to make an HTML version of the diaries that makes them a bit easier to read. I’ve also added a few different ways to browse and search the diaries, making use of the additional markup structure that I added to the diaries.

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Dear Diarist, fun is where you find it! (part 1)

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Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.

From the book jacket for Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti (hard cover 2024 U.S. edition)

When I read a similar description of Alphabetical Diaries in a book review, I was intrigued about both how Heti did it and what the results were like. (You can read the “B” chapter via a link on her site.)

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