Group 4 Final Project | Access and Accessibility – LACOL Introduction to Digital Humanities

Introduction

This project explores the histories of access and accessibility at Hamilton College and Vassar College. The guiding principle behind the completion of this project was the visualization of each of our institutions’ involvement and action in their founding mission as it relates to access to marginalized groups. We compared our respective institutions’ modern relationships to access as it relates to 1) accessibility in contemporary usage (disability and accommodation services) and 2) access of each institution’s marginalized group said to be prioritized at the founding. In order to complete this project, newspaper articles; student organization minutes and public correspondence; and pages from official websites were gathered from each institution.

Those resources have ultimately been used to visualize and analyze the shifts in meaning and intention around access and accessibility at both colleges, particularly in reference to physical infrastructure and personal accommodations.

Processes and Methods

We chose each institution’s founding periods, despite them being at vastly different periods, because the comparative element here comes from identifying and comparing the continued access of the college’s intended groups of focus, not a standardized period. For Vassar, this was women, as it was founded as a women’s college, but in this project we will primarily focus on accessibility in the context of disabled individuals. For Hamilton, this was the Oneida people, as Hamilton College started as Hamilton-Oneida Academy. The standardized nature derives outlining different pathways to the concept of access to a protected group. Where this was less available, we supplemented this lacking access to the marginalized groups by widening the scope to access as an evolved concept.

Voyant Tools was used in a supportive manner to provide a quantitative analysis of Hamilton and Vassar’s approaches to access motivations and initiatives. It was used in order to perform a textual analysis of the correspondence and reflections of the project group’s respective institutions. These materials were extracted from each institution’s archival collections of their respective founding.

TimelineJS was similarly used in order to visualize the data at hand, creating a consistent timeline that is grounded in the various documents that are utilized within this project. It was utilized for its user-friendly experience, intuitive interactiveness, and concise documentation. It serves as a primary tool for the user to contextualize the events as they occur with respect to the accessibility laws passed by the federal government.

The analysis was completed by constructing data from each institution separately. Along with this, each set of documents was split into two distinct time periods, dates near the founding of the respective college, and the more modern era which includes the latest 50 years of data. We used materials from each of our institutions separately and compared the data and interpretations with each other. Some of the documents were readily available as text files or PDFs, especially from Hamilton. Others, specifically around Vassar’s founding, were only mass image files that had to be physically transcribed. We divided the school and topic by each person (Adina assigned modern Hamilton, Alex assigned founding Vassar, Finley assigned modern Vassar, and Julia assigned founding Hamilton).

We selected multiple analytical tools as determined by our preferences and what best assisted in reader-friendly data visualization, with the main tools being Links and Cirrus Clouds. Links were primarily used to illustrate the points concerning the native populations at Hamilton, as it was important to show the relationships between words in characterizing natives at Hamilton, along with the Oneida nation as a whole. On the other hand, Cirrus diagrams were utilized for accessibility as there were large amounts of data to process between the time periods, found in multiple student newspaper articles. As a result, overarching trends were important to be demonstrated through the word frequency, indicating the topics that were discussed in the large corpora. In ensuring clarification and avoiding redundancies, only the most important visualizations are displayed within this website, as multiple methodologies were used per period and a group of documents. However, the conclusions we drew from the visualizations are mentioned throughout this report, particularly in our analysis section.

Data Visualizations

Vassar: Founding

1863-1915

Vassar: Modern

1970-1979

All Miscellany News articles referencing “accessibility.” 1970-79 (Six articles) Cirrus filtered to exclude the terms “said” “stated” “statement” and “according.”

2010-2013

All Miscellany News articles referencing “accessibility.” 2010-13 (Eleven articles) Cirrus filtered to exclude the terms “said” “stated” “statement” and “according.”

Hamilton: Founding

The primary focus for the founding document can be found in “The Documentary History of Hamilton College”, specifically through pages 27-31, titled A Plan of Education for the Indians, Particularly of the Five Nations

Hamilton: Modern

Natives

Accommodation

Timelines

The timelines below both contain their respective colleges’ major events when it comes to accessibility, whilst also providing important legislative context in the forms of dating the enactment of the Rehabilitation Act of ‘73, along with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Due to reasons mentioned in our analysis section, such as the erasure of past literature regarding the subject, and the lack of focus on these topics at the foundation of each college, most of the timeline points are skewed towards the present.

Vassar

Hamilton

Analysis and Interpretations

Upon viewing the Voyant visualizations of the founding of Vassar, tracing it from its evolution to the modern day, there seems to be some extreme differences between the two periods of time. In the beginning, the founder, Matthew Vassar, along with student accounts do not seem to mention accessibility at all. Vassar College was first and foremost a women’s college, and the construction of the buildings were meant to serve the able-bodied students that were able to attend the college. In particular, topics such as “Committee”, “Funds”, and “Office” paint a narrative in which the college was primarily focused on getting itself established within the Hudson Valley as an all-women’s institution, with not a single mention of accessibility with regards to disabled individuals.

As the timeline progresses, particularly to past the enactment of the Rehabilitation Act of ‘73, the specific mention of disabled individuals, at the time known as “handicapped”, was more prevalent, with special mention to the number 504– the section of the act that stipulated these rights given to people with disabilities. While words particular to the administration persisted, similarly to the founding period of Vassar, there is also a new focus upon the actual need for campus officials to conform to these rules and regulations, with topics like “compliance”, “accessibility”, and most importantly, the recognition of “prejudice” on campus against those who are less abled bodied.

These modern time periods are composed of newspaper articles, which include both coverage from the administration, along with student and faculty voices mixed into the corpora. As time passed onto the 2010s, there is much more result-oriented growth with specific buildings mentioned, such as Main Building, Swift Hall, and the Students’ Center. Along with this, the word “handicapped” is nowhere to be seen, with more progressive language taking a foothold on these documents. There is also a shift away from words like “barrier” and “expenditure,” and towards words such as “plan” and “budget,” creating a sense of actualization when it comes to ideas of creating a more accessible campus.

However, it is important to note that these papers are particularly future-oriented, talking of plans, organization, and “new” additions. The results of these plans do not line up with this language. As reflected in both data sets, none of the most common words focuses on completed projects or successes related to accessibility. With two people on this project who go to Vassar, these constructions rarely end up manifesting themselves as ADA-compliant, as the majority of student dormitories lack functioning elevators, the staircase to the main library lacks a ramp, and overall, neither of us have seen a Vassar community member utilize a wheelchair, speaking to how inaccessible campus buildings as a whole are.

On the side of Hamilton College, when discussing the founding of the college and the history between itself and the Oneida nation, these link graphs provided by Voyant are particularly illuminating in discussing the separation between the manner in which the Native Americans are talked about with comparison to the English colonizers. Negative modifiers such as “defrayed”, or modifiers which indicate naivete such as “youth” or “introduced” delineate the characterization of these natives, as those who should be educated and assimilated into western society, that it was “necessary” to do so. The specific links between “western” and “indian” further this point of assimilation, especially in the context of the characterization of the white settlers that attended the school. Words such as “formidable” and in the context of language, with connections between “English” and “knowledge”, “language” and “manners”, help illustrate these people as civilized, well-behaved, and intelligent. It is able to show how these Native Americans should strive to become like the privileged white settlers, which is why they attend the school in the first place, as assimilation was directly connotated to success.

In the modern era, specifically in reference to how the current administration speaks of the histories and foundations that it is built upon, there is a similarity in the centering of the more privileged group in these texts at the expense of the marginalized group. While there are plenty of mentions of the ties between Hamilton College and the Oneida community, Hamilton appears to be more centered and mentioned between the students, college as a whole, and other structures on campus. This is in stark contrast to the Oneida links, as the connections between important topics such as land, students, and people are far and few between. While mentions of specific leaders related to Oneida in the context of Hamilton College exist within these links, such as “Samuel” or “Shenandoah”, it appears that the majority of these connections center around the historical nature of the relationship between Hamilton and Oneida, wherein the conversation is dominated by the privileged majority, and represent the Oneida peoples as those who are historical, i.e. non-existent in the present day. This is further compounded by the context in which there is no proper evidence past the initial academy in which members of the Oneida nation attended Hamilton College.

As Hamilton interacts with accessibility in the present day, it is worth noting the significant use of “support”, “accessibility”, “resources”, and “services”. While this could indicate ample evidence of these words’ availability to the Hamilton community, some of the less frequently mentioned terms, such as “apply”, “search”, and “center”, resonate more with the experiences that students speak to. However, in student-published work, primarily originating from the activist-oriented paper, the Monitor, much of the language contributes to themes of mobilization, demanding better of the school. Hamilton’s word choice paints a more passive approach to support. This indicates that accommodations come with evidence and submitted applications, both of which are subject to bureaucratic and inequitable processes. The student publications discuss a reconsidered relationship to accessibility, where resources are practively available and provided. This can be seen in “receiving” and “extended” in relation to “accommodations” and “require”, “soon”, and “wide” as linked to “community”.

Comparisons, Connections, and Conclusion

For this project, our investigation was two-fold:

1) As each institution centered a vulnerable population in their founding, how has access to this group changed

2) With access having double meanings around these colleges, how does each college evoke the modern definitions of accessibility regarding accommodations and disability rights?

As mentioned, Vassar’s founding purpose was the education and empowerment of women, not all women. This pointed purpose shows up in modern examples of access and equity throughout the college. Such that the college was founded for able-bodied, wealthy, white women, Vassar continues to fall flat on intersectionality. In our research, we unpacked disability. In projecting an image of white feminism, the college lacks mention of liberating practices for those that would benefit from accessibility efforts and accommodations. In short, Vassar evokes its founding notions of what is now referred to as access, as women may attend, and those that struggle with inaccessible infrastructure are not actively considered by the school.

For Hamilton, they failed at continuing access to the Oneida people. Similar to Vassar in the modern interpretation of accessibility, Hamilton is also unable to safely and respectfully provide space for those needing physical accessibility materials. Those needing emotional and mental health accommodations are also without active support services and thus, have demanded better of the college.

The college represents itself in the same way: compliant. Both by excluding people in need of disability resources and by following legal demands, Hamilton and Vassar provide contributing to social justice in the disability space. Where these schools share their greatest commonality in this regard is the exploitation of “grandfathering” or the exemption from the ADA clause for buildings established prior to the policy. While this is not officially within the ADA, state and local governments that value the historical element of their culture will uphold their inaccessible buildings. This is representative of the prioritization of architecture and aesthetics over access and equity. While Hamilton and Vassar differ in their time and purpose of founding, they have evolved into spaces perpetuating unjust practices for community members.

Sources

Anthony, Constance E. “Anthony, Constance E. Diary, 1915.” Anthony, Constance E. Diary, 1915 | Vassar College Digital Library, digitallibrary.vassar.edu/collections/other-collections/vassar-college-student-diaries/a7f09239-2402-4861-8461-37104eb8a9bf. Accessed 22 July 2023.

Ibbotson, Joseph Darling, et al. Documentary History of Hamilton College. Hamilton College, 1922. Hamilton College Library Digital Collections, https://sparc.hamilton.edu/islandora/object/hamLibSparc%3A12355520. Accessed 21 July 2023.

Hutchins, et al. “Analysis of Facilities and Recommendations for Access for the Handicapped.” Hutchins, Evans and Lefferts, 31 July 1978. Vassar College Archives and Special Collections. Accessed 22 July 2023.

Vassar College Libraries, “Vassar Newspaper & Magazine Archive.” Vassar Newspaper & Magazine Archive, newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/. https://newspaperarchives.vassar.edu/ Accessed 22 July 2023.

Vassar, Matthew. “To Milo P. Jewett, 24 Oct 1863.” To Milo P. Jewett, 24 Oct 1863 | Vassar College Digital Library, digitallibrary.vassar.edu/collections/other-collections/matthew-vassar-papers/67d6e9f2-f6f7-424c-bdeb-04fba6955d44. Accessed 22 July 2023.

(Specific Articles from Vassar Newspaper & Magazine Archive used in data visualization can be found below)