Scholar makes historical documents available online

Leigh Bienen is a patient woman.

She pored over 14,000 handwritten historical documents kept by the Chicago police department on 11,000 homicides in the city between 1870 and 1930 and has now made these documents available to the public via an online database.

But she couldn’t get enough. Now, the former Wilson School professor is working on a new database with about 35,000 documents on the experience of Florence Kelley, who was the first female factory inspector in the United States.

Speaking in Dickinson Hall on Wednesday afternoon, Bienen, who is now a lecturer at Northwestern Law School, shared her works and ambition with an audience of mostly graduate students and faculty members.

Bienen and her husband, Northwestern president Henry Bienen, both have strong ties to Princeton. He is a former Wilson School dean, and she is a former administrative director for its undergraduate program. She is also a criminal defense attorney and an expert on capital punishment.

The wheels on her ambitious effort to process so many documents first started rolling when Bienen became frustrated with the limitations of sorting through the few paper documents that were available.

“There [would be] three copies of a document in the library, and we were constantly trying to figure out where each copy was,” she explained.

Because she wanted to make these valuable resources accessible to the public, Bienen took the initiative to post all the homicide cases online.“We are living in the middle of an evolution,” she said of the internet age.

History professor and American Studies program director Hendrick Hartog agreed. “I am making new connections that I would never have made if not for digital databases,” he said.

Her Chicago homicide database has been heavily used, Bienen said, adding that traffic was so heavy that the website server crashed right after the site was unveiled. “I knew that the colleagues I meet in conferences will take advantage of this new resource,” she said, “but I was stunned by the 13,000 original visitors each month.”

Bienen said that the success of the homicide database motivated her to start work on the Kelley database. Kelley, who was also a lawyer and a social campaigner in the late 1800s, inspired Bienen with her story.

“I first fell in love with Kelley’s prose style,” Bienen said. “The more I learned about her, the more I became interested in putting together a database.”

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But her endeavors haven’t been easy.

The first challenge was obtaining funding. Bienen recounted how her “initial request for $80,000 was turned down, as many people did not believe that anyone would be interested in the stories of a Chicago factory inspector.” Eventually, however, she was able to secure enough funding to go forward with her project.

More problems arose when Bienen attempted to collect the original documents. “I saw the archives at Cornell [University library] and the New York Public Library,” she said, explaining that she “would be charged $50 per document” by the New York Public Library “to put it online.”

But these obstacles didn’t stop her. She was able to negotiate with the bureaucracy at the libraries and successfully obtained the right to post the documents for a much lower price.

The end result is a massive database, containing photographs, national and state economic and census data, newspaper articles and detailed reports on the factories Kelley inspected.

“The database will be on the web sometime in October,” Bienen said with a smile as she showed a prototype of the website on Kelley. “My webmaster is still working on the layout. It’s going to be beautiful.”