Not Your Everyday Sawmill Journal

Today’s “what’s in Woodson” comes from one of our fantastic student assistants, Gabriel Witkop.

It’s a good day in the Woodson when we get the chance to correct an error or omission past Archivists made. I was going through a collection the Woodson Research Center procured a number of years ago about a German immigrant into Texas. The Reinermann, Sandman, Bethje and Quensell families of Harris County papers (MS 339) consists mostly of the papers and business dealings of one Wilhelm Quensell, the immigrant in question. My primary goal at this point was to ensure there were no discrepancies between the physical and online finding aid, but much of the charm associated with working in an archive is amusing yourself with the material as you go about your job. 

Just as I was finishing up, I came to a set of items labeled as a series of notebooks pertaining to the operation of a sawmill that Quensell was involved with in the 1870s. Not expecting to find anything, I offhandedly opened up one of these leather-bound notebooks, this one a bit smaller and older than the rest. The inside cover identifies itself as a personal diary for the year 1863. As far as I could tell from the rest of the collection, the sawmill definitely didn’t exist in 1863. Flipping through, I stop at a random page. The entries seem to have departed from the listed dates at the top of each page, and have bled into 1864. Handwriting has changed dramatically since the U.S. Civil War, and although I would consider myself fluent in cursive, I am decidedly not fluent in half-centimeter tall 150-year-old cursive. I could, however, make out discussions of a camp somewhere called Pleasant Hill. After a quick Google search, I found a battle on Pleasant Hill that took place on April 9, 1864. Flip to that entry, and I confirm Quensell was there. Cool! Mystery solved – or so I thought.

I turned my attention to the inside cover of the diary again, noting some sort of what looked like identification information. After a great deal of squinting, I gathered the name of one Edwin F. Stanton from upstate New York, as part of the 114th New York Infantry. Huh? Why is the diary of a Union soldier part of a collection we acquired from a German immigrant who fought for the Confederate Army in the second half of the U.S. Civil War? The New York 114th wasn’t even at the battle of Pleasant Hill!

Although the item itself was mislabeled, turning to the collection description did indeed yield some insight into this diary. As it turns out, this was the 1863 diary of Edwin F. Stanton, a Union soldier from New York. For about 6 months, that is – when Stanton’s handwriting cuts off and is replaced by Quensell’s. Luckily, it doesn’t seem that this change of ownership was violent: there’s a couple of months of missing entries, and there are records of an Edwin F. Stanton as postmaster in the years after the war. It’s a shame he lost his diary, but I’m glad it survived and landed in our hands after an interesting life.

Gabriel Witkop (Will Rice ‘26)

Student Assistant – Woodson Research Center

Homecoming Royalty Timeline

Karen Ostrum and Mike Dunn, 1976

For those visiting Rice for Homecoming, you’ll see a timeline documenting homecoming royalty in the main hallway of Fondren Library. Don’t fear we have also created an online exhibit that features a timeline.

Keep in mind that all of the data came the Campanile, the Thresher, and our photograph files. There are definitely years that we have no information for, so that’s why there are some gaps.

Ben Ramey

It’s been a longtime since we last posted, because it has been mighty busy.

Over the summer, we got a new collection from the daughter of Howard Porper, a founding member of the Houston Folklore and Music Society. It’s filled with great photographs and fliers documenting the early days of Houston’s folk scene, when the focus was on performing and celebrating traditional folk tunes rather than writing new songs.

In that collection, a person named Ben Ramey stood out to me. The photograph below is of him at the 1948 Progressive Party convention, pumping his fist, holding a brochure “Songs for a New Party.” It’s unclear if this is the Texas one, which he spoke at, or the national. We also have program from the national convention. Ramey served on the Party Rules Committee for the state of Texas. Basically, this got me incredibly interested and I fell down a rabbit hole a few days later, but only found out a bit of the story. I fell down another one this weekend and found out even more.

Ben Ramey was born on October 7, 1921 in Dallas. At some point in his life, he contracted polio, which caused him to use a brace. This may have been the reason why he did not participate in World War II. He attended SMU for his undergrad and UT Law.

He moved to Houston in the late 1940s and joined the law firm Mandell & Wright, which represented unions like the NMU. After Mandell, Wright, and Ramey’s participation in the Henry Wallace campaign and his visit to Texas, which caused a stir (Paul Robeson was there), the firm lost their NMU contract (Red Scare: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas). They shifted more strongly into civil rights and also did personal injury law.

In 1950, Ramey represented a group of Black men who were attempting to integrate the golf courses run by the city, Beal v. Holcombe. They lost the case. He also represented Herman Marion Sweatt early on in his case that ended up in the Supreme Court, Sweatt v. Painter, which aimed to integrate UT Law School. He attended at least one meeting of the Texas NAACP.

Ben Ramey and his wife May lived in Bellaire and were active in the Jewish community. They pop up in Bellaire newspapers via The Portal to Texas History. He gave talks at the Jewish Community Center concerning support for the UN and explaining civil rights legislation and participated in a variety of Jewish organizations. They also participated in a kibbutz.

As for his creative side, he, Ed Badeaux, and Mack McCormick worked on a folk show called “Hootenanny.” He did not perform music, but was the host. It included performances by Mance Lipscomb, Howard Porper, Pete Rose, Jimmie Lee Grubbs, Jim McConnell, John A. Lomax, Jr., and Ed Badeaux. He also performed in a Neil Simon play directed by Niel Sandy Havens.

It’s the last tidbit of creativity that made my jaw drop. He wrote sci-fi short stories under the name H.H. Hollis.

The Bellaire newspaper mentions at least a couple of times of Ramey overcoming sicknesses, like pneumonia. He passed at the age of 55 on May 14, 1977 and was cremated. He and May had no children.

If you, by chance, no more about May Ramey, please let us know.

Refreshed and New Online Exhibits

If you check out our new digital collections website, you’ll see a tab on the main menu labeled “Online Exhibits.” We are currently moving our old online exhibits from the platform Omeka Classic to our new platform. This will be happening steadily over the next year. Below are some that we have already refreshed or are brand new:

British Navy During the Napoleonic Era

Houston Folk Music Archive

Liberty Hall

Ralph Fales photography (new)

Rice Presidents and Provosts

For those of you interested in the behind the scenes work, some of these new exhibits rely on the web page builder that is used throughout the site, while others employ an exhibit builder. We’re looking at each old exhibit and deciding which options work best for it. For some a linear exhibit works, while for others an A-Z list will help someone discover something new or something that sparks old memories.

New Features in Digital Collections, part 2

Last time, we explored in-text searching. This time we’re going to look at audio and video.

Our audio and video items are in the process of receiving new enhancements, namely closed captioning. A perfect example of this is the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice Friday webinars.

In the image above, you can see the following:

• an auto-scrolling transcript
• closed captions that can be turned on or off
• adjustable playing speeds
• a keyword searchable transcript

For most of our backlog of already transcribed audio and video, we are using a separate AI service, Sonix, to create vtt files that work with our new platform.

For some of our content without transcriptions, we are using the platform’s own AI transcription service. We’ve already taken the news masters from the KTRU archive and ran them through this system. We haven’t cleaned up the transcripts, so please forgive the mistakes. In general the AI has done a good job transcribing the audio, making it more accessible for a larger community. It also took about 10 minutes for it to transcribe around 30-40 news masters.

We hope that you explore our audio and video and will be patient with us while we work to get everything captioned. As a handy reminder you can search all of the audio and video, by selecting the terms under format at the bottom of the homepage.

New Features in Digital Collections

I wanted to cover some new features that we have in our Digital Collections site. Feel free to give them a test drive.

Search Terms Highlighted in Text

If typed/written text has been enhanced via OCR (optical text recognition) or gone through an AI application that runs HTR (handwritten text recognition), you can then search the text of a document and keywords will show up on the original page. Let’s look at two examples.

The Campanile

Here’s a search for “beer bike.”

You’ll get a list of yearbooks that you can select to see more. I’ve selected the 2010 Campanile. You can see that the phrase “beer bike” is highlighted in the text. You’ll also see it highlighted on a corresponding transcript. Below your first result, there might be more results to explore.

Edwin Lunn diary

While we haven’t run many of our items through the HTR process (It requires the author to have good penmanship, which isn’t always the case.), here is one good example. Be aware that we haven’t cleaned up the AI generated transcript.

If you didn’t know, we already have TXT transcripts for many of our handwritten letters. We are in the process of moving those over to the new system. By relying on this type of transcript, it won’t highlight the words on the actual letter, but you can see the words highlighted on the transcript to the right.

Next time, we’ll look at enhancements to our A/V collections.

Searching the New Site, part 2

Today, we’re going to tackle two other ways you can search the new digital collections website.

Advanced Search

On the home page underneath the big search bar or in the upper right corner of any page, you’ll see the option for Advanced Search.

By clicking on that option, you’ll be brought to a new screen. You can do a keyword, title, or description search. You can also select from many options below to refine the search.

For example, you could search “beer bike,” and then select the collection that you are interested in, like “Rice Images and Documents.” If you are interested in beer bike from the 1990s, you can search the term and select 1990s from the Time Span option. When looking for a topic that is broad, this can really help you narrow your focus.

Browse Categories

At the bottom of the home page, you can search only by categories. For example, you could select the subject “Health and Medicine” and limit your 205 results by time span “1970s,” which will give you two results. You could also expand your results by adding another decade like the “1980s.” Your results will expand or shrink depending on the combinations that you choose. Happy searching!

Searching the New Site, part 1

With our new digital collections website, we tried to provide a variety of options to search it. I’ll highlight two ways to do that.

On the menu at the top, you can select “Explore Collections.” This will take you to an A-Z list of all of the collections on the website. This method works well if you know the name of the collection that you are looking for.

If you don’t know the name of the collection you want, you can also select by themes. If you want material that is not related to the university’s history, select “Special Collections” on the menu. We have grouped our collections thematically ranging from American Civil War to Medical Humanities and much more. We have also highlighted collections that we maintain with stakeholders like the Houston Asian American Archive and the White House Scientist and Science Policy Dynamic Digital Archive.

After selecting a theme, you’ll arrive at a page listing the collections with a bit of information about each one.

Finally, by clicking on a collection, you’ll usually encounter a description of the materials, a short biography or other background information, and ways to access the finding aid/inventory for the collection. Depending on the collection, you might even encounter a blue button that will point you to more information. The Aaron Martin letters have been mapped, so the button redirects you to a StoryMap.

Depending on the size of the collection, you can decide how to sort the items (by title or date). You can also filter by date on the left hand side.

Here’s a look at the University Archives. There are fewer themes, but we’ve tried to select themes that alums, faculty, staff, and more want to find like oral histories, videos, radio broadcasts, yearbooks, and the student newspaper.

Next time, we’ll explore other ways to search the using the search box, advanced search, and the search categories on the home page.

New Digital Collections Website

If you haven’t noticed, things have been pretty quiet on the blog. One major reason is that we have been undergoing a massive migration of all of our digital items that have live here to here.

While we have still have work to do, we have moved over 16,000 digitized/digital items into our new Quartex platform.

Please take some time today to kick the tires at digitalcollections.rice.edu.

If you’d like to learn more about the new system, please check out this great Rice News and Media article.

Upcoming blog posts will be highlighting how to use the new site.

Maus in the House

Last Friday, we welcomed Art Spiegelman to the reading room.

Mr. Spiegelman very kindly created an original drawing and signed a copy of his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel Maus to add to our rare book collection.

Mr. Spiegelman was visiting the Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop (CATS) Collection of original and printed comic art housed in the Woodson Research Center. The collection forms part of the Comic Art and Teaching Workshop at Rice University. A portion of the works have been created by American artists, including 14 pieces donated by Lewis and Vera Kaminester include a three-panel Mickey Mouse comic strip by Walt Disney, a Bil Keane “Family Circus” illustration and multiple works from Chic Young’s famed “Blondie” series. Mexican, German, Chinese, and Japanese artists are also featured. Initial processing, digitization, and exhibit creation for this material is being undertaken by Rice undergraduates Irene Wang, Jenn Nguyen and Sophia DeLeon-Wilson, under the leadership of Chris Sperandio, as part of a Fondren Fellows project “Out of the Gutter.”

Donated by Christopher Sperandio, the collection supports CATS (Comic Art Teaching and Study Workshop) a research space and annex classroom for the studio art area based in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University. It’s a repository for original comic art and books that are available to students, faculty and guests of the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts.