Washington Women’s Heritage Project (WWHP) Oral History Corpus
Version 1.0
July 2026

ABOUT THIS DATASET

The Washington Women’s Heritage Project (WWHP) Oral History Corpus is a curated collection of oral history transcripts derived from the Washington Women’s Heritage Project, a statewide initiative documenting the lives and experiences of women in Washington State.

The corpus has been prepared as a machine-readable dataset intended for computational analysis, including text and data mining (TDM), natural language processing (NLP), and digital humanities research.

This corpus contains 48 interviews represented in 228 text documents.

DATASET SUMMARY

- Number of interviews: 48
- Number of text documents: 228
- Total word count: approximately 1,010,420 words
- Date range of interviews: 1980–1998
- Geographic coverage: Washington State

CONTENTS

This package includes:

/texts/
  Plain text (.txt) files derived from oral history transcripts

metadata.csv
  Structured metadata describing each interview

methodology.txt
  Documentation of corpus selection, processing, normalization,
  and transformation methods

license.txt
  Terms of use and reuse for this dataset

PURPOSE

This dataset is designed to support:

- Keyword searching and concordance analysis
- Topic modeling and clustering
- Named entity recognition
- Comparative analysis across interviews
- Digital humanities research
- Computational linguistic analysis

RELATIONSHIP TO THE ARCHIVAL COLLECTION

This dataset is derived from:

Washington Women’s Heritage Project records
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Archives West identifier: ark:/80444/xv43023

Collection Guide:
https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv43023

The original collection includes:

- Oral history audio recordings
- Transcript materials
- Project documentation
- Photographs
- Related records

Online access to audio recordings and transcripts is available through
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.

IMPORTANT NOTE ON USE

This dataset is a transformed version of archival materials and is intended
for computational analysis.

It does NOT include:

- Audio recordings
- Full archival descriptive context
- Associated project records

Researchers are strongly encouraged to consult the original archival
collection when interpreting findings, quoting content, or conducting
historical research.

DATA STRUCTURE

Each oral history transcript is stored as an individual UTF-8 encoded
plain text file within the /texts/ directory.

Files are named using unique identifiers, such as:

wauar_3416-001-wwhp_alexanderLavinia01_side1.txt

These identifiers correspond to records in metadata.csv.

METADATA

The metadata.csv file includes:

- id
- title
- interviewee
- interviewer
- date
- location
- collection
- source
- language
- url

These fields support filtering, grouping, and corpus analysis.

SCOPE AND COVERAGE

This dataset represents a subset of the full Washington Women’s Heritage
Project oral history collection.

Selection was based on:

- Availability of transcripts
- Accessibility for computational reuse

The corpus should not be considered complete or statistically
representative of the entire WWHP collection.

RIGHTS AND LICENSING

This dataset is licensed under:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
(CC BY-NC 4.0)

See license.txt for complete terms.

The underlying archival materials may be subject to additional
restrictions. Researchers should consult University of Washington
Libraries Special Collections regarding reuse of original materials.

CITATION

Please cite both:

Dataset:
Washington Women’s Heritage Project Oral History Corpus.
Version 1.0. 2026.

Source Collection:
Washington Women’s Heritage Project records.
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.
Archives West identifier: ark:/80444/xv43023

LIMITATIONS

These transcripts are textual representations of spoken interviews.

They do not preserve:

- Tone or vocal emphasis
- Timing and pacing
- Non-verbal communication
- Full audio context

These limitations should be considered when interpreting computational
analysis results.

CONTACT

University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
https://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/

VERSION HISTORY

Version 1.0 — July 2026

- Initial release
- Normalized transcripts
- Structured metadata provided