Research Project

Digitizing U.S. Sleep Cultures

Digitizing Sleep Culture
Principal Investigator
Huber, Hannah
Start Date
2019-07-22
End Date
2020-07-22
Funding Source
University of Illinois System Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and Humanities, UIC Institute for the Humanities, UIC University Library

Abstract

Hannah Huber, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Digital Humanities at UIC, is currently working on a digital component that will as a serve as a companion to her book project, tentatively titled Sleep Fictions: Bodily Cycles on the Progressive Era Clock. Her monograph takes an interdisciplinary approach to literary and critical sleep studies to underscore the circumscription of sleep and social agency at the advent of modernity, arguing that writers from Charles Chesnutt to Charlotte Perkins Gilman mobilized sleep to convey race, class and gender disparities that belied the promising twenty-four-hour productivity of the Progressive Era.

She is building her accompanying digital repository in Scalar, an open-access online platform designed for academic authorship and scholarly projects. She is also using Scalar's tag visualization to thematize page notes, which have been created as annotations within the public-domain literary texts featured on the site.
Theme tags highlight sleep-related concerns and debates prominently featured in fiction and other forms of popular print culture surrounding the Progressive Era. These themes range from the period's sleep-related literary and cultural tropes, such as the Sleeping Beauty figure, the neurasthenic, and the Somnambulist, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century medical terminology including insomnia, parasomnia, and sleep deprivation. Other concerns represented by theme tags relate to conditions of soporific addiction, caffeine dependency, and time anxiety, as well as issues of social agency within the context of gender, race, class, and disability. These thematic tags enable visitors to seek out topics in critical U.S. sleep studies that relate to their own research interests and scholarly inquiries.
Cover image courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York: 1892 photograph by Jacob A. Riis for a report on West 47th Street Iodging conditions in the New York Tribune.