Welcome to the Emma B. Andrews Diary Project!
Our team is lead by Dr. Sarah Ketchley of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, with collaborative contributions from our fantastic student interns. Sarah’s research focuses on Nile travel in the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, begi
nning with the the unpublished journals written by Mrs. Andrews between 1889 and 1913. Emma gives us a unique eyewitness account of society, travel and archaeology in Egypt at the turn of the century, and she was present when over 20 tombs were opened in the Valley of the Kings.
Our team’s historical approach blends traditional humanities scholarship with digital methodologies. We transcribe our primary source material, encode it so that it is machine-readable, then use computer scripts to create databases of the people, places, archaeological sites and boats mentioned in the diaries and letters we work with. This allows us to build digital social networks of ‘who was where when’ in Egypt at a specific point in the past.
