My first blog post centered around a great find from the Bryn Mawr College archives: a poem from the 1988 Pluralism Issue of the Alumnae Bulletin. In it, an alumna wrote about Bryn Mawr’s lesbian heritage, complete with subtle references to our history and second President, M. Carey Thomas. I analyzed the poem here.

Soon after, the archives proved to have many fewer articles related to our LGBT history than I had thought. Born of this setback was my struggle with archival silence. I “led” an unconference session at PhillyDH@Penn about archival silence, where a group of archivists, students, and professors discussed how to bridge the silence gap, and how to represent it in the final exhibit. I wrote about the value of this collaboration and its results here.

My next post was linked directly to the previous one; I discussed how perhaps the biggest result of the unconference session was the conviction that Omeka, a digital exhibition builder, was not the right tool for this job. After discussion with my supervisors, we decided to try Scalar, the multi-linear mapping tool in which you are currently reading. Read about the decision here.

Finally, I wrote about formatting within Scalar. The exhibit went through multiple iterations with drastically altered connections between pieces of content. I used color-coded Post-It notes to track the changes. I wrote about one of the final paths here.

Titles were hard! It took many sleepless nights of banging my head against a wall before I came up with anything, and then many more before anything good appeared. I eventually returned to the site of my first blog post, the poem by Judith Masur '68. Her first line spoke to me, reminding us that this project is first and foremost about how intrinsic LGBT identities are and have been to Bryn Mawr’s history. “We Are/We Have Always Been” is thus the perfect title for my project, and I am proud to quote an alumna for the name of this piece.

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