LIS Student Reflection: Dominique Stringer, University of Kansas

Introducing Home-Making: A Jewish Kansan Storytelling Project

Dominique Stringer, University of Kansas, Master of Museum Studies Student, University of Kansas

In 1903, a woman named Sara gave an envelope full of unpaid meal vouchers to her friend Rose, with a handwritten note asking Rose to ensure the vouchers were paid and assuring her that “the hungry are being fed.” Both Sara and Rose were part of a local Jewish women’s group in Topeka, Kansas, known as the Hebrew Ladies Benevolent Society. The society raised money to support local charities, supported immigrants from Russia in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom, and helped provide access to kosher meals for Jews moving through Kansas in search of work.

This letter, and other documents like it, provide a glimpse into the often-unseen labor of Jewish women to create supportive Jewish spaces in the Midwest. Focusing on the often-unseen labor of Jewish women in Kansas, Home-Making: A Jewish Kansan Storytelling Project explores the social pressures that pushed Jewish immigrants into the Midwest in the 20th century, as well as the support structures they built to maintain community connections.

By considering the ways in which Jewish immigrants have integrated into communities while simultaneously resisting assimilation, this project shows how Jewish Kansans have navigated cultural isolation and discrimination. Extending beyond the idea of a single narrative of immigration, this digital project hopes to provide a broad look at the diverse ways that people have interpreted Jewishness as the diaspora has brought them to the Midwest.

In the 2025 LIS Student Program, I used CollectionBuilder to re-envision this ongoing initiative with new organization and visualization tools. During the program, I digitized items, collected metadata, and learned some fundamentals of digital collections best practices to help bring this project to life.

Using CollectionBuilder

CollectionBuilder has been an invaluable asset to the Home-Making Project. I had some past experience with digital projects as a scholar in the humanities, but my limited knowledge made building a website a daunting task. The expertise that the CollectionBuilder leaders shared in the student program, and in the publicly available documentation, was instrumental in helping me to take my project from an idea to a functional website. Whenever I had a question about how to change a feature or update my content, I was almost always able to find the answer in the CollectionBuilder documentation, which is a testament to the work that the CB team has done to provide guidance to learners from a wide range of technological backgrounds. I am grateful to the CollectionBuilder team for their commitment to open-source projects and information accessibility.

For me, one of the most important features of CollectionBuilder is that the website structure is strongly object-based. It is important to me that the objects in the Home-Making collection remain the heart of the project. With CollectionBuilder, I feel that the objects are always at the forefront. The visualization features, such as the map, timeline, and word clouds, provide useful ways to explore the collection stories, but every visualization page gives a link back to the item page where the related object lives.

CollectionBuilder is also a valuable option for people who want to maintain control over the metadata that forms the basis of a collection. Because the item pages are generated from a csv file, it is easy to update the items on a CollectionBuilder site, or to pull the data from the site for use in other projects. For me, CollectionBuilder offered a useful model for how metadata in a spreadsheet can become the basis of visualizations. Seeing the values I put into my spreadsheet translated into locations on the map helped me to think more practically about how I was creating, saving, and organizing metadata.

Addressing Challenges

As with any digital project, one of the biggest challenges to learning CollectionBuilder was setting aside an appropriate amount of time. It takes time to download software, to gather data, to customize features, and to troubleshoot problems. Sometimes, I would find myself wanting to make what seemed like a straightforward adjustment, such as changing the format of a story page, only to end up in a rabbit-hole of reading documentation, clicking on references, and looking up terms that I didn’t recognize. While learning any new system takes time, I would encourage fledgling CollectionBuilders (myself included) to accept this as part of the learning process. As you practice building pages and sites, the process you struggle through at first will become more familiar, and may give you a greater appreciation for the labor required for digital projects.

My second major challenge was also related to the learning curve for digital projects. In the CollectionBuilder LIS program, I had to become more comfortable with breaking things. Through CollectionBuilder, I learned that a digital project is often a practice of trial and error. Several times, I tried to commit a change on the Home-Making website, only to realize that I had wrecked the formatting, or straight up caused my content to not be visible on the site. Working on this project helped me learn not to panic in these moments. Instead, I learned to troubleshoot through the issues, consult others for advice, and revert pages when necessary.

These two challenges led to my biggest takeaway from the CollectionBuilder LIS Student Program: Iterating. The term iterating, introduced to me by Evan (one of the CollectionBuilder team members), can refer to repeating an action or to making incremental changes. Before this program, I had only ever thought of phases of a project as drafting, where there were various rough drafts before a final draft is produced. With CollectionBuilder, I have begun to shift my thought process to an iterating mindset. I have found iterating to be useful both to Home-Making and to other non-digital projects because it allows for continual project growth and change. Rather than working toward a single final draft of Home-Making, it is possible to recognize the current project as one iteration of the project, which may or may not take other forms in the future. Having permission to make many (many) versions of the project without feeling like they were “incomplete” was a freeing experience, and the concept of iterating is one that I plan to carry with me into future projects.

Looking to the Future

I am excited to have CollectionBuilder as a tool in my digital humanities toolbox, and I look forward to continuing to develop Home-Making as a CollectionBuilder site. In the future, I hope to add new objects to the collection, and to continue developing the stories pages. When it comes to reimagining collections, I believe that CollectionBuilder is an invaluable framework for organizing, exploring, and sharing digital objects and the stories connected to them. In my own career, I have envisioned using CollectionBuilder to expand Home-Making, to begin other digital storytelling projects, and to host a digital portfolio of my research. For anyone else considering CollectionBuilder, I would highly recommend that you test it out. The beauty of CollectionBuilder is that it is remarkably customizable, with a low barrier to entry. If you have a collection and the willingness to learn, I believe that using CollectionBuilder will be a rewarding experience.

Explore the Project!