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Navigating the Jane Addams Digital Edition

Finding Documents

You can browse documents by date or by subject.  We have over 350 subjects broken out, so scan them to see what might fit your research topic.

You can also search for specific text in the Addams Digital Edition by using the search box. Note that when you use the search feature, you will also locate people, organizations, and events that contain your search term. You will also locate all mentions of that word -- so be prepared!

Advanced searches allow you to fine tune your search. You can limit your search by selecting specific fields. For example, if you want to look at Addams' views on peace before World War I broke out, you could search the subject "Addams, Jane, and peace movement," date contains "1913" and type = "text".

People, Events, and Organizations

The Jane Addams Digital Edition is building a complex network of the people, organizations and events that made up Jane Addams' world. Every person who wrote a letter to her, received a letter from her, or was mentioned in a document has a record in our People tab. The same is true of Organizations. For Events, we select specific ones that are important to Jane Addams' life.

These pages serve as a portal to that person, organization, or event. If you open a person record, you will find biographical information, and in some cases a short biography. If we are able to locate a rights-free photograph, we will include that as well. At the bottom of the image you will find tabs that allow you to navigate all mentions of the person in the edition.

Map View

The map view lets you organize documents, people, events, and organizations by their geographic location. You might find it a useful way to determine how Jane Addams is connected with your town or city.

Because there are a large number of items, generating the map takes a bit of time. Please be patient while the bouncing balls do their work!

The map uses facets to give you counts of documents, click on any bubble to zoom in on that group. Single items are plotted as red dots.

Tags

Tags are another way to locate materials by content. They are similar to subjects, but they include people, organizations, events, and documents. If you open a tag for medicine, for example, you will see doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical conferences, and documents that discuss surgeries, and public health.

Tags are a good way to quickly see the extent of material that we have. It also allows you to connect issues with people that are associated with them, which can help you contextualize Addams' work.