I began this journey in the summer of 2011 while volunteering at my town’s local history room. I was looking through old newspapers to find relevant town information. When I reached the “Farmington Valley Herald”, I found almost a complete year’s worth of weekly newspapers from 1912. We only needed the sections specific to the town, but the rest was just too fascinating to throw away. As I read through the paper, I realized that some of the articles I read seemed very similar to things I see posted on facebook every day. There was the annoying updater sharing their every action-found in the neighborhood sections about a woman going to visit her daughter in the next town over every single week. There was the over-sharer in the report of a woman having indigestion. The idea of writing in to the local newspaper (if one still exists) to inform them of your illness seems rather absurd today, yet chronicling the agony of your allergy suffering via status updates is done without thought.
I was intrigued. I hear all the time about the lack of privacy that comes from over sharing on the internet, yet here was the same thing. While there is the obvious difference in the speed and scope of information travel, there appeared to be the same desire to share the important and mundane with our communities. What defines these communities has certainly shaped over time. No longer is our community merely formed by location of habitation. While interaction with those in our immediate proximity is and always will be important, technology allows us to create new communities that go beyond physical boundaries. Authors connect across time zones and continents to read and write fanfiction purely for the fun of it. Relatives who live far from one another can instantly share photos and experiences, as if they lived just down the street. School networks on sites such as facebook allow important information to travel among students who may have nothing in common other than attending the same institution.
Ultimately, in spite of the changes wrought by technological advances, people have the same desire to have a connection to something bigger than themselves
The Project:
The first step was to scan all of the newspapers and clippings. The motivation behind this was twofold. Firstly, the condition of the papers required scanning for ease of processing. Although they held up much better than a newspaper printed today would, they crumbled every time I turned a page. It was times like this when I was grateful for the extremely large margins on the pages, allowing for this decay with limited loss of data. Sadly, the same could not be the same regarding the central fold line, which cut right across articles and was often the most damaged part of the page. (Public Service Announcement from your friendly neighborhood archives nerd: If you are saving anything paper that you hope will be kept for years, please do not fold them. Aside from metal paper fasteners such as staples or paper clips, folds are one of the worst things that can happen to a piece of paper.) Secondly, my ultimate goal is to post the entirety of the scans to this page so that it could be accessible to a larger audience for research purposes or just for fun. This feature will be developed as this page evolves however at the moment I will be sharing the bulk of my clippings in the topics discussions.
The next step is research. First, I want to investigate some of the topics that arose in the papers themselves, either implicitly or explicitly. These include but are not limited to race, the Roosevelt Bull Moose presidential campaign, and the sinking of the Titanic in the immediate aftermath of the event. I also will be examining the links between these newspapers and our modern social media, eventually tying everything together on this page.