On August 18th, 1920 the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, officially giving women the right to vote. In Her Own Right wanted to celebrate, and what’s a celebration without friends? So, we contacted some colleagues at the Louisiana Digital Library, and the rest was history…
Exactly 100 years post-ratification (August 18th, 2020), 23 attendees from across the country joined In Her Own Right and Louisiana Digital Library staff for a virtual data jam. A “data jam” is a type of hackathon — in our case, we used computer software to solve data problems, instead of solving computer software problems. Some of our attendees worked on assigning LCSH subject terms to different activism-oriented subtopics, such as suffrage or abolition, and then created spreadsheets to feed the visualization. The others learned how to manipulate JSON code to create an RGraph visualization using the InfoVis toolkit. All workshop materials can be found in this data jam Google Drive folder, so you can try it out at home! Our final project will be added to the In Her Own Right database site soon, and will look something like the below image (although it will be interactive):
We concluded our workshop with a “Toast to Tenacity”. Today, August 26th (aka Women’s Equality Day), Vision 2020/Women 100 is hosting a celebration where they will join with groups across the country in toasting the suffragists who won voting rights for American women. We celebrated a bit early, so you can see us below at the end of the data jam raising our glass to activists past and present. On that note, don’t forget to exercise those rights–register to vote!
