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• 1 2020-09-21T17:35:44+00:00 Using Hidden Literacies 12 Introduction 4 plain 2023-08-28T12:43:56+00:00

  We conceived Hidden Literacies to make archival texts as accessible as possible, in multiple senses. For students and scholars who cannot travel to distant archives, this site brings texts to their computer screens as high-resolution digital images. For teachers who wish to bring these kinds of texts into their classrooms, they are published here (with appropriate permissions) as an open-access educational resource. And for readers of all kinds—from students unprepared to read cursive to professionals who are new to these exact subject areas—each text is transcribed and, most importantly, interpreted by a leading scholar of historical literacy. All the contributors bring to bear on their text the contextual knowledge and analytical insight necessary to reveal what otherwise might remain hidden.
  
  With the invaluable guidance of our colleagues in the Trinity College Library, Mary Mahoney, Joelle Thomas, and Cait Kennedy, we designed Hidden Literacies to achieve these several forms of accessibility and be readable like a book. You can read the whole “anthology” in linear fashion using the navigational buttons at the bottom of each page; you can also skip from place to place by clicking on links. On every page of the site, an icon at the top left corner of your browser window provides a complete table of contents, allowing you to dive into the section of your choice. Each titled section begins with a page introducing the text and the contributing scholar. From there, one stream of content—“original documents”—contains images, transcriptions, and sometimes translations of texts, while the other—“commentary”—features the contributor’s essay about the text (which you can read online or in a downloadable PDF) as well as the relevant episode of the Hidden Literacies podcast.
  
  However texts survive—are created, used, and preserved—it is invariably the case that archiving serves other interests than those of the creators. A whole host of people render judgments on a text’s purpose, meaning, and value: the historical actors who kept some papers and discarded others, who gave what they kept to a library or historical society (or didn’t); the professional archivists who catalog it in certain ways and make it accessible in certain contexts; the researchers and readers who encounter texts via certain kinds of information—key words, finding aids—and see them through lenses of their own. Archives get reinvented over and over again by different generations of librarians and scholars. Along the way, knowledge can be lost or forgotten. Hidden Literacies emerges from our sense of responsibility to find anew what might have been left aside by a different generation, or by those looking for different kinds of materials. This is our archive of American voices, and we invite you to enter it. 
  
  In episode two of our podcast, two archivists discuss what it means for materials to be "hidden" in the archives:
  

  (Episode transcript)