Day 11: Portrait Archive & Jack the Ripper Tour

Today we went to the Portrait Archives, and then later in the evening we did a Jack the Ripper walking tour. The Portrait Archives were simultaneously higher and lower than my expectations going in. I was impressed with the fairly open access of the collections and the content of the collections, but I was also disappointed with the short nature of the session. It was nice to talk with the archives staff about their digitization efforts and online catalog.

As for the Jack the Ripper walking tour, I will admit that I had very low expectations of this tour. I am not a fan of true crime and find the use of these cases of violence against women as touristy attention grabbers as deeply disrespectful to the victims and their surviving families. Another project I work on at the archives is updating the metadata for our index collection of local homicides to be more ethical, so that might be why I am hyper-critical of things like this. Still though, the tour was enjoyable at times due to the tour guide's ability to connect place with history.

Portrait Archives