The Sylvester Manor Project at NYU seeks to bridge the gap between the Sylvester Manor Archive and its user communities by utilizing digital humanities technologies to accomplish the following objectives:
Project Background
Sylvester Manor is a historic property and operational farm on Shelter Island, located at the eastern end of Long Island, New York. On the ancestral lands of the Indigenous Manhansett People, Sylvester Manor was established in 1651 by Nathaniel and Constant Sylvester, Anglo-Dutch sugar merchants and enslavers who established the manor as a provisioning plantation for the family’s sugar plantations in Barbados. The original 1651 house was demolished by Brinley Sylvester and replaced by the 1737 Manor House, constructed by enslaved laborers and remains standing today. Recognized as the “most intact slaveholding plantation north of Virginia,” Sylvester Manor was farmed and worked by enslaved Africans and African Americans until 1820. Later, indentured Native American and European servants served generations of the Sylvester family. Sylvester descendent Eben Fiske Otsby created the Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in 2010 as 501(c)3 non-profit organization that seeks to continually cultivate livestock and organic produce on 60 acres of farmland; preserve the entire 236 acre property including historic gardens, burial grounds, and buildings; and educate the public about the site’s history.
In 2008, Sylvester descendants Alice Fiske and Eben Fiske Ostby donated a large collection of materials documenting several generations of ownership and stewardship of Sylvester Manor to the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University Libraries. The Sylvester Manor Archive represents a feat of archival processing and digitization labor from numerous archives students and staff. The collection was initially processed by NYU archivists Colin Wells, Liza Harrell-Edge, and Noah Gelfand from 2008 to 2010. At this time, the archive was arranged into record groups by family affiliation, then subdivided into series consisting of individuals’ papers, and then chronologically. The finding aid published in 2010 consisted of record titles that described both creator and genre. The R.D.L. Gardiner Foundation later sponsored further descriptive work from 2014-2015.1 Additional details about materials’ physical materiality as well as biographical information about the the personal and professional lives of the Sylvester, Brinley, Lloyd, Gardiner, Horsford, and Fiske families were added to scope and content notes for Record Groups I, III, IV, and V. Financial and legal records from Record Group I (covering the Sylvester, Brindley and Dering families during the 17th century) also received descriptive enhancements to its financial and legal records. During the course of these revisions, creator and genre information were separated into different descriptive fields; some items of similar genre or subject were consolidated; and some items received preservation treatment. The R.D.L. Foundation then supported a second major phase of conservation and digitization of the collection materials from 2016 to 2019, resulting in the addition of roughly 5,600 digital surrogates to the finding aid.
As Dorothy Berry points out in her case study on the “Digitizing African American Archival Materials Across University of Minnesota Collection” (DAAAUMN) project, “digitization as panacea assumes both that complicated and sometimes idiosyncratic catalogs and findings contain all the information that users need for digital discovery, and furthermore that the institutional digital access points, often behind university logins and paywalls, are somehow less intimidating and prohibitive…. The key feature in providing authentic (emphasis added) accessibility, [is] in providing descriptive equity across records.”2 Facilitating authentic accessibility for the user communities of Sylvester Manor – which crucially includes the staff of Sylvester Manor and their audiences in Long Island – means removing the assumption that the Sylvester Manor Archive is de facto discoverable due to significant description and digitization efforts. As the finding aid grew more dense in description and laden with thumbnails of digitized items, the more difficult it became for researchers to discern the arrangement and context of items. Additionally, because the vast majority of digitized materials are handwritten manuscripts incompatible with OCR, the content of most manuscripts is almost entirely obscured.
Furthermore, while a large amount of correspondence received “descriptive enhancements” during the 2014-2015 Gardiner Foundation-funded revision project, it is unclear what criteria was used to determine which materials warranted such enhancements and which did not. Indeed, as will be discussed in the next section, a large amount of materials referencing or pertaining to marginalized groups such as enslaved people, Indigenous people, free people of color, indentured servants, working-class Europeans, and women were not described in as much detail as those materials documenting the family patriarchs’ business activities. In addition to these descriptive disparities, the intellectual arrangement of the collection around the landowning families inadvertently obscures narratives and relationships that spanned several generations, as well as the roles of non-family members. These observations are not intended to undermine the years of labor contributed to this collection by NYU archivists and students. Rather, the project team sees the Sylvester Manor Archive as just one example of typical disparities in traditional descriptive, arrangement, and even digitization practices.
In 2022, History & Heritage staff at Sylvester Manor began discussions with the NYU History Department about possible ways to work together, and in 2023 they included NYU in a higher education collaboration project funded by the Mellon Foundation. This project enables students in graduate courses, along with graduate student assistants employed by project funds, to dig deeply into the contents of the Sylvester Manor archive, implement strategies to make them more accessible to scholars, and work with site interpretive staff and department faculty to create public-facing materials for use by Sylvester Manor. The department will also develop an undergraduate course focused on these archival materials.
Summary of 2024-25 (Year 1) Project Work
Identification of materials
Graduate research assistants Katelyn Landry and Brenna Moran spent the Fall 2024 semester analyzing the Sylvester Manor Archive finding aid and its digital surrogates to determine the following:
When graduate research assistants identified an item that they felt met any of the above criteria, they recorded it in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Along with the item name, URL, record group and series, the research assistants wrote a brief description about the item and its relevance to our target subject areas, which include:
The first six of the subjects in the list above emerged as areas of interest from previous historical research and interpretation undertaken by Sylvester Manor staff, NYU students and faculty, and other scholars. Additionally, the research backgrounds and interests of graduate research assistants Katelyn Landry and Brenna Moran influenced the team’s strong focus on materials pertaining to enslavement, Indigenous displacement, labor history, free people of color, and women and gender. Still, we attempted to keep in mind the interests stated by NYU researchers and Sylvester Manor staff members at the outset of the project. Additionally, we added to this list of subject areas when a particular subject or theme strongly emerged during our research, such as “Health and Medicine.”
We also assigned priority to items as either low, medium, or high. These priority rankings served to indicate the graduate research assistants’ opinions on a given item’s research value with respect to the subject area(s) it pertained to. High priority items would be transcribed and re-described first so that these most compelling items would be included on the project site as soon as possible.
Transcription
At the beginning of the Spring 2025 semester, undergraduate volunteer Edwyn Feng joined the project team to assist with transcription, beginning with items previously identified by the graduate research assistants as high priority. The team collaboratively developed a transcription guide that documents our workflows as well as recommended transcription practices compiled from other research initiatives focused on transcribing 16th-19th century English handwriting. We structured the transcription process so that each transcribed item is reviewed by at least one other project team member to collaboratively address questionable handwriting and ensure adherence to our guidelines.
Developing a digital platform
At the same time, the project team began consulting with NYU Libraries staff on potential digital infrastructures to support public access to project deliverables. These deliverables currently include:
We sought digital infrastructure that the project team could learn to use without facing an overly prohibitive learning curve, but would also be flexible and multifunctional enough to adequately display the range of deliverables we hope to serve to users. Furthermore, we sought a digital platform that would support collaboration across multiple project team members over the three-year grant period, with the eventual goal being to transfer full control over the project deliverables to Sylvester Manor staff.
We thank our colleagues in Digital Scholarship Services, Alia Warsco and Elliott Galvis, for presenting several digital infrastructure options that could potentially meet our project team’s needs. The project team was interested in utilizing static site technology early on in this brainstorming phase due to static sites’ reliability, availability, and flexibility all at a low financial cost and relatively low barrier of entry for project team members without advanced web development skills. After carefully considering our functional and technical needs and limitations, we decided to develop our project site with WaxBuilder, a minimal static site-builder for digital collections that combines functionalities from Wax and CollectionBuilder, both extensible open source frameworks for building digital exhibits and displaying digital archival collections.
Using the original Wax documentation by Marii Nyrop (NYU) and the supplemental Wax Docs+ documentation by Kiran Mohammadi-Williams (Cornell), the project team created a WaxBuilder site hosted by GitHub Pages. By uploading image files of collection items and a CSV metadata file to the repository, the site generates pages for each individual item including an IIIF image viewer and metadata fields. The site also enables users to browse the collection by any metadata field we stipulate: subject area, location, material type, etc. This interactive interface will provide users more agency to tailor their research experience and enhance their abilities to explore the collection beyond the simple keyword search function provided in the original finding aid. The site also generates an interactive timeline using start and end date metadata, as well as an interactive map that visualizes the locations of collection items’ creation by utilizing latitude and longitude metadata fields. The project team believes these visualizations will significantly bolster users’ understanding of the wider temporal and spatial relationships between collection items which are otherwise obscured by the linear, family-based arrangement of the finding aid.
The Wax repository template provides code for markdown pages that can be used for larger amounts of text for discussing collection materials. These pages, originally known as “Exhibits,” will be utilized for publishing blog posts authored by the project team and other student researchers. The Wax template also provides code for a page called “Teaching Tools” which is equipped with blocks designed to showcase a summary and image of an outside resource that the user can reach by clicking a button within the block. We are adapting these “Teaching Tools” into “Resources,” which will include links to the original NYU finding aid as well as the Sylvester Manor website and any other outside links that may be beneficial for users.
Rather than replicating metadata from the NYU Sylvester Manor Archive finding aid, the project team sought to provide supplemental metadata for the collection items featured on our site. Additionally, in order to ensure our metadata could be parsed correctly by Wax and WaxBuilder code, we had to map both the items’ original metadata created by NYU archivists and the custom metadata created by the Sylvester Manor project team (e.g. subject areas) to fields required and recommended in the Wax documentation.
| WaxBuilder metadata field | Description and source | Example |
|---|---|---|
| pid | The Wax documentation requires that each collection item have a unique Persistent Identifier (pid). For this, we are utilizing the Component Unique Identifier (CUID) that was assigned to each item by NYU Libraries during initial processing of the collection. In the case that the SM project team decides to display one document from a collection item that includes images of several documents (i.e. one postcard from a series of postcards that are cataloged as one collection item in the finding aid), the SM project team will generate a child pid that includes the CUID from the collection item followed by a dash and lowercase letter. | cuid4751 cuid4751-a |
| label | This field contains the title of the item provided by NYU Libraries in the collection metadata file.. However, the SM project team may revise an item’s title if we determine the original title is not adequately descriptive. | Grievances of Montauk Indians; Commissioners response; Expenditures account book |
| agents | The SM project team referred to the “Scope and Contents - 1 - Content” field provided by NYU Libraries in the collection metadata file. However, the SM project team also analyzes the item itself to discern whether there are any individuals or organizations who contributed to the item’s creation that were not originally identified by NYU archivists. | Thomas Eddy, Ezra L’Hommedieu, Montauk Indians |
| _dateStart | The SM project team referred to the “Date 1 - Begin” field provided by NYU Libraries in the collection metadata file. However, if the date is not provided in that field or if a more precise date is indicated in the item itself, the SM project team also analyzes the item to confirm the start date of creation. YYYY-MM-DD format. | 1806-02-18 |
| _dateEnd | The SM project team referred to the “Date 1 - End” field provided in the collection metadata file provided by NYU Libraries. However, if the date is not provided in that field or if a more precise date is indicated in the item itself, the SM project team also analyzes the item to confirm the end date of creation. YYYY-MM-DD format. | 1809-03-21 |
| description | This field contains a description of the item’s contents written by the SM project team. | Newspaper clipping announcing a petition being brought to court by the Indigenous people of Montauk to regain their land. The news clipping is accompanied by a letter from Elisha Mulford and Huntting Miller asking Ezra L’Hommedieu to use his influence as a New York State Senator to intercede against the Natives’ petition, which would damage Mulford and Miller’s land claims in Montauk. |
| series | This field contains an abbreviated version of the Scope & Content Notes written by NYU archivists for the series and sub-series that the item belongs to. | This item is located in Record Group II: L’Hommedieu Family, Series B: Ezra L’Hommedieu, Subseries 3: Legal Documents and Papers. This series contains materials pertaining to the professional life of Ezra L’Hommedieu (1734-1811),a prominent New York state politician, Patriot veteran of the Revolutionary War, and descendant of Nathaniel Sylvester. |
| tTags | A list of subject areas that the item relates to, as determined by the SM project team. | Indigenous peoples, Settler colonialism, Slavery |
| location | Primary location of the item’s creation | Montauk, New York |
| latitude | Sourced by inputting the item’s location into Google Maps. | 41.03632182 |
| longitude | Sourced by inputting the item’s location into Google Maps. | -71.9538294 |
| worktype | Generated by SM project team | Correspondence |
| originalwork | A citation of the item generated by the SM project team according to the Preferred Citation note in the Sylvester Manor Archive finding aid. | Financial Record with Notation, 1687 September 26. Sylvester Manor Archive, MSS 208, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. |
| format | FIle format of digital collection items | JPG |
| rights | A rights statement generated by the SM project team in consideration of the Conditions Governing Access and Use notes in the Sylvester Manor Archive finding aid. | While most materials in the Sylvester Manor Archive are presumed to be in the public domain, permission to use materials for publication or commercial purposes must be secured from New York University Special Collections. Please contact the Fales Library and Special Collections, fales.library@nyu.edu, 212-998-2596. |
| transcription | Generated by SM project team according to our transcription guidelines. | EddyCorrespondence_1806_f4qrfnsn |
Future Work
We anticipate future research assistants will continue uploading collection items to the WaxBuilder site, transcribing collection materials, writing interpretive blog posts, and improving user experience of the site. We also suggest following up on the following projects:
Robert David Lion Gardiner, for whom the Foundation is named, is a descendant of the Gardiner family, one of the oldest landowning European families in the U.S. and namesake of Gardiner’s Island, Long Island. His ancestor Samuel Smith Gardiner is a prominent figure in the Sylvester Manor Archive, as he owned Sylvester Manor following his marriage to Mary Catherine L’Hommedieu for several years during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. ↩︎
Dorothy Berry, “Take Me into the Library and Show Me Myself: Toward Authentic Accessibility in Digital Libraries,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 3 (2022), http://www.jstor.org/stable/45420503, 113, 125. ↩︎