- Published on
School Record scan for Lulu Paull’s Grade 8 class at Charles Brigg’s School in February 1919. Source: Calumet-Laurium- Keweenaw School District.
One of the datasets we’re so excited about with our new version of the Keweenaw Time Traveler is the School Records. These records were hand-recorded between 1904 and 1926 by teachers from the 24 public schools open to students from Calumet, Laurium, and the surrounding area and represent an incredibly unique dataset among historical geospatial scholarship. Hot off the digital press is a paper by Timothy Stone, Don Lafreniere, and Rose Hildebrandt in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. In this paper we argue for the importance of including children’s experiences in historical studies, outline the process by which we processed these records, and hint and some of the work we can do with these records. (*Spoiler Alert: two of the projects that use this data are already published – Mapping Historical Archaeology and Industrial Heritage: The Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure by Trepal et. al, and Schools as Vectors of Infectious Disease Transmission during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic by Lafreniere et. al.) If you’re interested in these records you can read a StoryMap we made using the records, explore on the Time Traveler itself, or read our paper!
Division of time-space we used to study a student's daily exposure to the industrial environments of the Keweenaw