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At #StanfordTextTechnologies, where various projects investigate the long history of text & especially the materiality of textual objects, we've just launched 'Recollections', which brings personal archives to life. This has been a tricky project /1
https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu/home/recollections-reviving-personal-archives
https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu/home/recollections-reviving-personal-archives
It's been a huge team effort with graduates and undergraduates, some hosted by @cesta_stanford. Trying to work out ways of displaying & describing the varied materials has been tricky & we've hunted for examples of best practice elsewhere /2
Valerie Leopoldine Gisella Fransky Layton Creed was an Austrian, born in 1906 & dying in 1994 in Croydon. She married a British man in the early 1930s, but they divorced a few years later and Valerie continued to live in London. She had a wide circle of friends all over Europe /4
Her family was Jewish, living in Vienna & Amsterdam in the 1930s. They wrote often to 'Vally', but it's unclear what happened to them after 1940. Vally herself travelled widely--Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, & worked as a translator & shorthand specialist, though times got hard /5
But the trickiest thing of all has been the ethical implications of making 'ordinary' people's lives public in this way. The Valerie Layton archive is a great case in point. Some of it is available on the website, but here's her amazing story /3
