Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
We are out of cards! Congratulations and thank you, volunteers!
Research
The Boston Phoenix
For nearly 50 years, The Boston Phoenix was Boston’s alternative newspaper of record, the first word on social justice, politics, and the arts and music scene. Its intrepid journalists tackled issues from safe sex and AIDS awareness to gay rights, marriage equality, and the legalization of marijuana. Ads for roommates, romantic mates, and band mates—one could find all these and more in the newspaper’s probing, irreverent, entertaining pages.
It ceased publication in March 2013, but in 2015 was preserved for posterity thanks to owner Stephen Mindich’s decision in September to donate the paper’s archives to Northeastern University's Archives and Special Collections.
Research
For any researcher visiting the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections to research Boston’s political, cultural, and social history between the 1970’s through the early 2000’s, The Boston Phoenix is always recommended as a primary resource, and is widely used both for direct research and as a pedagogical tool.
Although there is a robust description and links to descriptions of the content acquired as part of the Phoenix collection on its portal page, https://phoenix.library.northeastern.edu/home/, there are currently very few direct entry points into the collection. Either a researcher needs to have a reference to a specific article (including a date); the only other option is to browse the bound volumes.
However, the Phoenix did produce two typed card file indices to its paper, which allowed reporters to find similar articles from years past that could help them with their writing. One index is a subject index, the other is an author index. These indices have been scanned, OCRed and made available online here:
Author Indexes, 1973- 1990
Index Subjects, 1974-1986, (bulk 1974-1982)
Filed by year, each author and subject index usually consists of >1000 cards, and includes multiple entry points including date, page, section, title, author, section, and subject.
Additionally, January-June 1974 of The Boston Phoenix had been disbound and digitized for preservation purposes. (It was too fragile for public use). These issues have been made available in the DRS. So if your article is within these date ranges, you can read the article you just indexed! https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/collections/neu:cj82m7888
Goals
The primary goal of the Boston Phoenix 1974! project is to build a community of support for Phoenix publications by asking volunteers to take a deep dive into the arts, culture, politics, and topics of Boston in 1974. This community will hopefully be inspired to read articles they have transcribed and write about them on their favorite social media platform.
The secondary goal is to make the project available for educational purposes. Several faculty members have reached out looking for hands-on projects that could keep their students engaged while studying from home and/or fulfilling experiential education requirements. Educators have successfully used Zooniverse in many different curricular settings; several of these could be modified for Phoenix work. https://blog.zooniverse.org/category/education/
A completed index could also become a prime source for other digital humanities projects, tracking trends in politics, the arts, or news through time. How did so-called 'fringe' causes, such as LGBTQA rights, marijuana decriminalization, and alternative energy become mainstream? What issues in 1974 were at the forefront of the arts and politics sections of the Phoenix?
The tertiary goal of the project is to make a fielded dataset from the 1974 cards, starting with the author index (~1500 cards). If successful, the project could also be expanded to include the 1974 subject file, and to subsequent years. It will be some time before researchers have broad, searchable access to a scanned Phoenix collection that has been OCRed, and still some more time before an accurate article subject index could be created via METS/ALTO or another standard that the library might adopt in the future.