Stanford Ordinary People Extraordinary Stories (SOPES)

Stanford Ordinary People Extraordinary Stories (SOPES for short) is a project concerned with preserving ordinary lives of the past, the stories of “normal people” that would otherwise be forgotten.

The project is interested in the mundane and the prosaic rather than the glamorous. It emphasizes the importance of safeguarding personal archives like collections of letters, postcards, diaries, and other ephemera. Without individual archives and the desire to retain our own intimate histories, mainstream archives risk becoming lackluster and monolithic. The project therefore seeks to diversify what we define as an archive and validate individual attempts to write history.

SOPES is a project of Text Technologies.

Core People