Established 2023
This website investigates the use of printing presses in U.S. prisons, from their origins to the present. Through curated collections, collaborative research, and open access datasets, it aims to generate more research and public interest in these rare, unknown materials and the unique stories they contain.
The project’s first case study is Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP), a historic prison (now a museum) in Philadelphia, focusing on the three publications known to have been printed there: The Umpire (1913-18); the companion papers Pen Points and Grate-Phil News (circa 1934); and Eastern Echo (1956-67). All of these newspapers are almost entirely extend in single fragile copies held today at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site.
In early 2025, the project expanded its datasets to include Reformatory Record, printed in the 1890s at Pennsylvania’s Industrial Reformatory at Huntington, which is still in operation today as SCI Huntingdon; and three publications printed around the same time as, and incommunication with the editors of, The Umpire: Star of Hope, out of Sing Sing in New York; Our View Point, out of the state penitentiary at Walla Walla, Washington; and Lend a Hand, out of the state penitentiary at Salem, Oregon. By expanding beyond Pennsylvania, we hope to begin to track the network of relationships between the penal press in the 1910s. We are grateful to JSTOR for providing images of Star of Hope, Our View Point, and Lend a Hand. These datasets are still in development and so are not public yet, but we would be happy to share what we have if you write us: trettien at english dot upenn dot edu.
Project Timeline
This project began in Spring 2020, in Professor Whitney Trettien’s undergraduate “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course at the University of Pennsylvania. That semester, students generated and worked with archival data from ESP in collaboration with ESP archivist Erica Harman as a means of learning digital humanities research methods. Although the sudden switch to remote learning in March 2020 put many plans on hold, this course resulted in two student-led and -designed digital projects: Blundin’s Blunder?, an interactive Ren’Py game exploring the questions faced by incarcerated women right after the prison’s opening, and a website documenting the use of quantitative methods in analyzing sex crimes, race, sentencing, and pardoning in the Admissions Books held at the American Philosophical Society. During this time, the copies of The Umpire held at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site were also brought to the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to be photographed.
The Covid pandemic put any further work on hold until Fall 2022, when Whitney Trettien teamed up with Cosette Bruhns Alonso, Cassandra Hradil, and Andrew Janco in the Research Data and Digital Scholarship team at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to begin the process of producing this website. SCETI photographed the copies of Eastern Echo held at ESP in Spring 2023, while research assistant Lauren Kim began indexing the digital copies of The Umpire, Pen Points, and Grate-Phil News, building on an earlier index generated and produced in FileMakerPro by researchers at ESP. An alpha version of this site was launched in June 2023.
From 2023 to late 2024, a team of research assistants, listed below, began indexing the Eastern Echoes. Lauren Kim also began indexing Reformatory Record, while Roberto Gonzalez began indexing Our View Point, Star of Hope, and Lend a Hand. In late 2024, the project released the Pen Points/Grate-Phil News and Eastern Echo data on the site's library.
In Fall 2024, a team of students in Trettien's “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course at the University of Pennsylvania wrote blog posts illuminating stories from within the collections. This was an exercise in curating data sensitively and ethically. You can read them here.
In Spring 2025, Trettien and Gonzalez began working on a series of videos to illuminate the archival materials and connect them to issues in prisons today. These were released on the site in March 2025.
Acknowledgments
Turning extremely rare and fragile physical materials into research-ready digital images requires many hands and much time. For their support, we thank Erica Harman, archivist at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, who provided research assistance, freely shared her institution’s data, and literally shepherded the newspapers to the University of Pennsylvania to be digitized; Michael Overgard in SCETI and photographers Christopher Lippa and Andrea Nunez for expertly digitizing these materials; and Eric Dillalogue and John Pollack in the Kislak Center for Special Collections for logistical and research assistance.
Taking these materials and turning them into data also requires significant effort, led by team member Andrew Janco. We thank the Price Lab for Digital Humanities for providing the research funds that allowed us to hire and mentor research assistants, who are listed below; the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site for freely providing us with their own earlier index of articles and granting us permission to publish our extended version here; and Nicky Agate, former head of the Research Data and Digital Scholarship team, for supporting this project.
