Sleep Fictions: A Digital Companion

About

This website is a digital companion to my book Sleep Fictions (University of Illinois Press - Topics in the Digital Humanities series), which takes an interdisciplinary approach to literary and critical sleep studies to investigate the ways in which U.S. sleep culture circumscribed social agency at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that writers, including Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, mobilized sleep to convey race, class and gender disparities that belied the promising twenty-four-hour productivity of the Progressive Era, underscoring the impact of exhaustion and sleep disruption on marginalized and displaced bodies. Digitizing Sleep Cultures complements my book project and functions as a digital archive and text visualization tool that enables visitors to interact digitally with my research findings and to further explore U.S. sleep cultures from the Progressive Era to today. 

This project was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship for the Digital Humanities Initiative, a grant awarded to the Institute for the Humanities and University Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago by the University of Illinois Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and Humanities. 

This digital archive was created in Scalar. It was originally hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago Library's Digital UIC service, and is currently hosted by Reclaim Hosting. It features visualizations generated through Scalar and Google Ngram, as well as links to customizable text visualization tools via Voyant. The vast majority of the digitized documents on this site are in the public domain and were acquired between July 2019 and March 2020 from digital repositories including: Cover image courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York. Details: 1892 photograph by Jacob A. Riis featured in New York Tribune report on West 47th Street Iodging conditions.

Author's Website: Hannah Huber, PhD

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