This project archives the survey responses of Anna Julia Cooper, a woman born into the slavery in 1858 during the Civil War era who began her education at 9 years old in Raleigh, North Carolina. She then went on to earn a BA in Mathematics in 1884 and an M.A. for college teaching in 1987 at Oberlin College. In 1925, Dr. Cooper earned her PhD in France, becoming the fourth ever African American woman to earn a PhD. Five years later in 1930, she responded to a survey of Negro College Graduates documented in this project, and her extensive answer to one of the questions about her racial philosophy
was later treated as an essay apart from its original context. For information on the survey see the entry on Anna Julia Cooper in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy and its section on her Other Select Essays and Writings.
The goal of this project involves restoring the context of Cooper’s essay by transcribing the Negro College Graduates Occupational History survey together with Anna Julia Cooper’s responses to its questions, and turn it all into an easily accessible, readable, and searchable digital format. For that, we decided to represent the texts as clearly as possible without trying to reproduce the original format of the survey. For example, instead of choosing a cursive font, we decided to use a simple sans-serif font and apply a dotted outline to distinguish the handwritten texts of Dr. Cooper from the printed survey form. This makes the survey significantly easier to read in a web browser than attempting to make it resemble the original handwriting.
This project uses TEI XML, alongside XSLT, to markup and transform the text. TEI XML allowed us to encode important features, such as metamarks to display checkmarks for what Cooper checked off in the survey, as well as easy tagging for questions so that those wishing to adapt the code have an easy time adding upon this project.
