FWP Life History Project in the American South: Machine Readable Text and Metadata

The data is created from documents in the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) Papers, 1936-1940 held at The Southern Historical Collection at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. From 1936-1939, writers were sent across the American South to record life histories as a part of the Southern Life History Project. Previously only PDFs, each life history has been transformed into a .txt file. The csv files include metadata about the life histories such as  writer name along with their race and gender, interviewee name along with their race and gender, reviser along with race and gender, location of the interview, and year. The data was designed for a historical research project, so scholars made decisions about race and gender guided by their expertise on the era and the analytical questions driving the project. It should be noted that labeling people by race and gender is a complicated process and practice of power, so care should be taken when using these categories. The data only includes the life histories held at UNC-CH, so it is not a complete collection of all life histories conducted in the region. The data was created for the Photogrammar project with funding from an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Extension Grant. As a condition of the funding, the data is made available under a GNU Public License (GPL).