English Professor Ivy Schweitzer was awarded a $250,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities in June to continue her work on the Occom Circle Project, according to a College press release. The project aims to establish an online archive of Samson Occom's works, which represent the largest surviving collection of writings produced by a Native American prior to the 20th century.
Occom, a Mohegan Indian, was a student of the College's founder Eleazer Wheelock, and many of his works are kept in Baker-Berry Library and Rauner Special Collections Library.
The three-year grant, which is a part of the NEH's Scholarly Editions program, will begin in January 2011 and continue through January 2014, Schweitzer said.
The collection is unique in that it not only includes works by Occom but also letters written to Occom, letters about Occom and other related archives, Schweitzer said. The digital archive will cross-link related material and correspondences and contain annotated versions of the text, she said.
"This puts Occom at the center of a larger cultural movement in which you can see how important his work is," Schweitzer said.
The online archive is also significant because it encourages groups of humanities academicians to work together on a larger project, she said.
Schweitzer is collaborating with members of several College departments on the project, including College archivist Peter Carini, Barbara Knauff, a member of the curricular computing staff, and Mark Mounts, who developed customized Text Encoding Initiative software to markup the documents, according to the press release. James O. Freedman Presidential Scholars Mitch Davis '11 and Nina Maja Bergmar '11 will also work with Schweitzer on the project.
Davis is a member of The Dartmouth Senior Staff.
"This project is kind of like having a lab for the sciences," Schweitzer said. "I would really encourage other humanists to work in this collaborative multi-generational way."
Schweitzer first became interested in Occom after viewing a presentation at a Dartmouth powwow in May 2005, she said.
"We were talking to Mohicans during the powwow and after the presentation an older man raised his hand and said to me, If Occom is as important as you say he is, why isn't there more information about him at the College,'" Schweitzer said.
Schweitzer said she agreed that the College's decision not to celebrate Occtom represented a substantial "omission" from College history. The Occom Circle Project began after Schweitzer taught a first-year seminar in 2005 focusing on Occom's work but had difficulty accessing his letters, she said.
As a result, Schweitzer proposed a one-term fellowship with the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning in Fall 2006. DCAL provided the initial funding for digitizing Occom's works, she said, but funding for the project ran out after the prototype for the website had been created. Schweitzer then began working with several Presidential Scholars on the Occom Circle Project, she said.
The online archive of Occom's works is based in many ways on Brown University's "Slavery and Justice" committee, which explored and digitized records detailing the history of slavery at Brown, she said.
A prototype of the archives is currently available online and the website is expected to be completed by 2014, Schweitzer said.