Wolfe Studio Archives
Brought to you by the Digital Welty Lab
Contents: About The Wolfe Studio Archive | Contributors | Tech
About The Wolfe Studio Archive
From entertaining adventures abroad to heartfelt advice and poignant life philosophies, the Wolfe family letters offer meaningful glimpses into the lives of artists, their friends, and their work. They provide an entryway into a wide array of topics and historical moments. These moments include World War II, military life, popular books and magazines throughout the decades, art shows and exhibits, and even contemporary discussion of Mississippi’s one and only Eudora Welty.
It is also fascinating to see how through the decades, people and their daily lives don’t change all that much. In a series of letters sent by Mildred Wolfe to her friend Margaret Alexander, Mildred Wolfe discusses summer plans and striving to get good grades. Writing to Karl Wolfe, Wayne Wills lists his Christmas presents; another sees him discussing Karl’s book. While we may be far from these people in time and space, their writings emphasize their humanity and the value of friends, family, and community.
This project results from a collaboration between the Wolfe Studio and the Digital Welty Lab at Millsaps College. Led by Michael Pickard, the Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Literature at Millsaps, students in the Welty Lab learn about the field of digital humanities and develop skills in transcribing, archival work, scanning, and research. Moving forward, the Wolfe Studio team will continue to undertake the process of organizing, labelling, transcribing, coding, and scanning the documents in the Wolfe Archives. In addition, the data being input into the archive’s spreadsheet will be used to continuously update this CollectionBuilder site so that the documents and research data can exist in a secure and enduring space, helping to ensure the legacy of the Wolfe Studio.
Colophon
Under the guidance of daniel johnson, Michael Pickard, Sara Teasley, and Bebe Wolfe, two student Welty Fellows, Isabella Suell (class of 2023) and Patricia Syner (class of 2024), began work on this project during the fall 2022 semester. Macy Weaver (class of 2024) joined the project in the fall of 2023, and Mariam Bhatti (class of 2026) started in the spring of 2024. Together, these Welty Fellows have transcribed, encoded, and scanned hundreds of items belonging to the Wolfe Studio Archive.
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
Using the CollectionBuilder-CSV template and the static website generator Jekyll, this project creates an engaging interface to explore driven by metadata.