Daily Archives: March 1, 2021

Colored Conventions Project

What need or opportunity motivated the creation of the digital archive or collection?

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) aims to document and bring to “digital life” the seven decades-long history of nineteenth-century Black organizing, through both the utilization of digital archival practices and the production of digital exhibits that bring a variety of stories to “digital life”. Inspired by the “Color Conventions”—a series of nineteenth-century political gatherings that offered opportunities for free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans to organize and strategize for racial justice—the CCP centers its work around Black life, specifically the victories and tensions in attempts to build community and protest racial injustice that, when placed in conversation with one another, materialize a diverse and complicated picture of Black intellectual/cultural production. Highlighting the centrality of Black women in nineteenth-century Black political organizing is key for the CCP, and they make that clear in both its core principles, as well as its exhibits. In doing so, the project manages to not only bring to light the biographies of forgotten Black women in these movements, but also provides new ways of thinking about what constitutes political action.

Who is the intended audience, and what technical or design choices make that audience explicit?

The CCP explicitly describes itself as collective and community-centered, wherein scholars from both within and outside the academy are involved in its production. As such, the intended audience would be any member of the public interested in learning more about nineteenth-century Black life, political practice, and intellectual production. The project’s site UX and design choices reflects this inclusive idology, wherein the site’s central feature is its exhibits. While the CCP provides access to digital records alone, these digital exhibits are interactive, navigational, and informational sets of pages that curate the project’s records to narrate significant events and moments in nineteenth-century Black political organizing. As such, these exhibits weave together graphics and text to create an interactive educational experience with accessible language, simple navigation, and straightforward information hierarchies.

What is the relationship between the creator of the archive project and the materials?

The project started from a graduate class the University of Delaware, and expanded into an interdisciplinary group of people both within and outside the academy. Over 2,500 people have contributed to the archive. Those working on the project center their work around their principles, which are modeled after the Colored Conventions themselves. Indeed principle 1 of the CCP’s principles is “CCP seeks to enact collective organizing principles and values that were modeled by the Colored Conventions Movement.” Thus, the project’s theoretical and political hinge grounds itself with its material, in a way.

What are the technologies used? What skills would you need to develop a similar project?

I couldn’t find any information that pointed to specific technologies utilized for this project, but I presume technical and digital data collection, scraping, and visualization tools were used in this process, along with an understanding web development and WordPress. I think that not only would one need to know how to perform this different methodologies, but also be able to have strong collaboration and communication skills.

What could future projects learn from this example?

The way in the CCP is able to curate accessible and informational digital exhibits, as opposed to laying out digital records, is a particularly interesting and helpful way to disseminate historical information and educate members of the public, who may not have the intellectual skills or background to produce insights from records alone. I think this way of curating information to make particular arguments, and highlight particular insights, is pertinent for digital humanities scholars, for it not only provides net outlets for educating, but also inherently requires the formulation of political goals.

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive

https://web.northeastern.edu/nulab/the-early-caribbean-digital-archive/

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive is a collection of pre-twentieth century Caribbean texts, maps, and images, which include travel narratives, diaries, and poetry. These texts were collected with the intention to tell the story of European Imperial domination. The archive currently has 57 early Caribbean texts, of which 30 texts are prefaced with scholarly introductions, which explain why each text is significant in current studies. The stories of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans are explained throughout this collection to show that the lives of the Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans truly shaped the culture and development of the Atlantic world. 

This archive is primarily developed by Europeans who use digital tools to constantly update and incorporate new content into the archive. The diaries in this collection have not been pieced together before as a single collection to focus only on the Caribbean, which makes it evident that the goal of this archive is to expand how we discuss and think about history, colonialism, and the experiences of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people in the Caribbean.

The Project team Professors, Aljoe, Dillion, and Doyle organize their collection in an extremely accessible manner, which aids those, like myself, who are not as technology inclined to easily have access to the archive’s texts, maps, and images. There are also connections across the materials, which grants a more comprehensive sense of the early Caribbean setting. To develop an archive similar to this, one would need to evaluate, retrieve, and arrange new collections of materials that have not been collected before and then be able to collaborate with a team to organize and archive the team findings. This would mean that each researcher would have to effectively evaluate and select the materials they choose to present to other team members. Using this archive, future archivists would learn how to develop unpresented materials into pieces that would aid in understanding history from a different aspect.

The Digital Acropolis Museum

The Digital Acropolis Museum Image

The Digital Acropolis Museum is a new, ongoing project to digitize the Acropolis Museum’s collections as well as create digital activities that showcase the museum’s items. The Acropolis Museum itself began in order to provide a safe space to house and display Greece’s antiquities within its own country. This was mostly in response to the British Museum’s current possession of marbles from the Parthenon.

As an extension of the Acropolis Museum’s creation, the Digital Museum aims to provide access to the museum’s objects via its website, allow for the use of “digital material” both in the museum itself and online to expand upon the visitor’s experience, and to digitally preserve the museum’s cultural objects.

The audience for this project is anyone who is visits the Acropolis Museum (either in person or online). There is a dedicated section for children as well that is called Acropolis Museum Kids and has its own website separate from the museum’s main website.

There is an option on the website to take a virtual tour through the museum. This virtual tour is done in partnership with Google Arts & Culture to allow you to “walk” through the museum and look at the items on display. They have also created a database to store the metadata of each item, digitization of objects, photographing, 3D scanning and the development of multimedia applications that allow for educational experiences online.

One would need a lot of funding to create a project that includes all aspects of this website/archive. The Acropolis Museum has done a lot in the fairly few years it has been established to try to have their collections openly available and accessible to visitors online. Between the virtual tours, applications and the collections database, there is so much content available for learning and more to come (according to their website).

The Palestine Poster Project Archive

https://www.palestineposterproject.org/

The Palestine Poster Project Archives started in the mid 1970s. The founder Dan Walsh, began his poster collection during his time in Morocco with the Peace Corps. Founded as a result of his thesis, by 1980 the archive accumulated 300 posters about Palestine. With a grant by the late Edward Said in 1980, the project expanded steadily over the years, currently standing at 14000 posters sourced from varied locations. The poster archive functioned as part of a curriculum for American high school student. This is important given the fact that Palestinian existence and history and the formation of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict is often erased within American institutional bodies.

For the purpose of this archive, Dan Walsh set a clear definition of what a Palestine poster is: Any poster with the word “Palestine” in it, any poster created or published by any artist or agency claiming Palestinian nationality or Palestinian participation, any poster published in the geographical territory of historic Palestine, any poster published by any source which relates directly to the history of Palestine or any poster related to Zionism or anti-Zionism in any language published after August 31, 1897 (after the first Zionist congress)

The archive has two intended audiences. Firstly Walsh sought to create the posters as a tool for curriculum enhancement in teaching Palestine to high school students. Secondly, his archive could be used by educators, activists, scholars, and any other interested party that wants to integrate Palestine posters to its activities. The PPAA offers a unique perspective on the history of modern Palestine and its cultural heritage. According to the creator, the posters provide a unique lens through which audiences can gain insight into the attitudes and aspirations of people directly involved in the contemporary history of Palestine, as they have experienced it and recorded it in graphic art.”

Making the site in which the archive is hosted accessible, Walsh’s technical and design choices divided the posters into four categories.

1) Arab and Muslim artists and agencies

2) International artists and agencies

3) Palestinian nationalist artists and agencies

4) Zionist and Israeli artists and agencies

These categories are meant to provide clarity as to where the posters originate and who are their creators. This in turn makes audiences aware of the origin of their sources, specifically if they were created by Palestinian nationalists and their allies or by zionists. This itself would be helpful to do research on both parties The creator also stresses the importance of having all the posters presented in one site together (Palestinian created and zionist created ones).

Organizing all posters from all different four sources into one place “obviates the gratuitous complexities” when posters related to Palestine are all randomly categorized by archivist under varied terms, which makes access harder for people seeking research material on Palestine. I found this aspect to the archive to be very appealing and useful it allows students and researchers to look at materials coming from the four different categories of sources alltogether. It is not clear whether Dan Walsh has uploaded all the archive to his website but that was his initial goal. The majority of the initial posters were printed on paper, however digitally produced and distributed posters have seen a rise in numbers and he has included certain requirements to those electronic posters.

The archive is also tagged by artist names and nationality, as well as country and year of publication. I think this categorization allows for researchers to investigate and study some aspects of transnational solidarity with Palestine that are only accessible through materials like posters and event flyer

The PPAA website also includes a very extensive Frequently Asked Questions page that addresses questions such as copyright issues, duplicate posters, fair use, the Palestinian-Zionist conflict and long-term plans. I think this is a very strong aspect to the project and it speaks directly to its audience and addresses any potential questions users might have.

This project is unique, as it has grown to be an extensive archive of historical materials that preserve the memory of Palestine: its history, culture, society, and politics. Importantly the accessibility of this website and its nature as an open source archive, means that many people can contribute to making the amount of posters that it holds more robust. To this end future project could  learn from how collaborative of an archive it is. Through making it so accessible, it is both able to have a wide reach as a tool for preservation and teaching while also gaining many submissions from various groups around the world.

The Pulter Project

The Pulter Project
The Pulter Project; http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu

Overview

17th century poet Hester Pulter’s manuscript of 120 poems on topics ranging from politics, mythology, royalism, war and death, and an unfinished romance was stored and unread for over 250 years at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, UK. In 1996, graduate student Mark Robson, rediscovered the manuscript while working in the library. Subsequently, two scholars of early modern literature, Wendy Wall (Northwestern University) and Leah Knight (Brock University), along with an international team of collaborators, embarked on the Pulter Project to:

  • Make Pulter’s poetry public by adding her work to the canon
  • Create an ongoing, collaborative process by which audiences can see the making of Pulter as a poet and writer using multiple editorial voices in a digital landscape

Audiences

The Pulter Project is unique in that it uses technology and scholarship to explicitly pursue multiple audiences simultaneously. The website presents each Pulter poem with multiple views: 

  • The “Elemental Edition” is intended for general readers of all levels who want to read the poems. The editors have added punctuation and minimal scholarly annotations and notes to create a basic springboard to further work on Pulter’s poetry.
  • The “Amplified Edition” is accompanied by more extensive editorial notes by experts for more advanced scholars.

One can view both editions side-by-side in a comparison view. Concurrently, one can view the original manuscript page and companion readings for the poems in poetry, literature and science, religion, literature, and women’s writing in sections titled “Curations” and “Explorations”.

Creators

The Pulter Project founders Wall and Knight had access to the original manuscript and conducted a workshop to explore different ways of editing, contextualizing, anthologizing, and digitizing Pulter’s poems. They collaborated and partnered with Northwestern University, Northwestern’s Media and Design Studio, and Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, as well as established a digital team, and an editorial board of scholars in early modern writing, manuscript studies, poetry, early modern science, politics, poetry, and gender studies. Wall and Knight photographed the original manuscript and transcribed the poems to create the “Elemental Editions”.  A uniform set of editorial principles and style guidelines were established to aid in the “Amplified Editions”.

Technologies

The project was created using a customized model of the Versioning Machine (VM) software from the University of Maryland which allows the project to present multiple—sometimes very different—versions of the same poem side-by-side. VM requires the XML coding language (human and machine-readable), so all of the poems are encoded according to the P5 Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). High-resolution images provided by the Brotherton Library are zoom-able. The website’s introductory page features animation and a professional “teaser” video. Another video on the “About the Project” page is longer but filmed in a similar format, featuring animations of period engravings, footage of the manuscript object and interviews with the project founders.

Conclusion

The Pulter Project is an innovative use of technology for an archival project which future projects can be inspired by. The first short animation and teaser video presented at the outset are mysterious and intriguing and invite the user to explore the website further. The video does a great job of showing the manuscript as an object that has survived centuries, an aged and imperfect historical object. The two “Editions” associated with each poem attract different audiences and allow multiple access points to Pulter’s poems. Interactive elements such as hovering over a word to get its definition, and the ability to have comparison views open and draggable to alternate positions makes the user feel like they are in control of the website and how the information is perceived. The additional scholarship found in “Curations” and “Explorations” is a wonderful opportunity to explore themes further. Another feature that makes this project unique among archival projects is that the user can see the collaborative process and editorial decisions involved in making verse accessible, a process which is often invisible. 

Jean’s blog post (1): review on Black Press Research Collective

Blog post on Black Press Research Collective

Archival Necessity

Black Press Research Collective (BPRC) aims to promote a digital scholarship centered on the subject matters of Black Diaspora and pan-Africanism through a digitization, analysis, and distribution of black newspapers (and at times, magazines) published by African descendants. BPRC believes, drawing on Colin A. Palmer’s notion of African Diasporas, African descendants are bound together in opposition to racial oppression in various periods and settings across the globe including the African continent. Also, modelled on The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC)’s research service, BPRC, documenting global black press, seeks to generate new methodologies appropriate to this concept of Black Diaspora and a construction of pan-African communities, which evade or challenge the approaches in more traditional research methodology. In so doing, BPRC is intended to encourage new generations of scholars in the study of black newspapers and their significance in African Diasporic communities.

Audiences & Designs

BPRC’s audiences are primarily academic (and journalistic) scholars that are interested in global black press with their previous understanding of the concept and history of Black Diaspora. Also, BPRC provides digitized and analyzed resources for educators in this area of study. The level of knowledge and information (centered on the scholarship and publication of black press) appears directed toward a specialized audience rather than a general audience. The section of “Data Visualization and Multimedia” also is designed for academic educators (rather than students or unprofessional researchers). The section of “Resources” (which includes the information of conferences, call for papers, fellowship, and relevant organizations) is also specifically addressing the interests of specialized scholars and academics.

The Creator & Their Relationship to Materials?

BPRC’s founder/director is Kim Gallon, an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. At this time, the founder appears being in full charge of updating this archive though I’m not sure whether there are more members involved in consideration of the archive’s collective purposes in line with the modes of African Diasporas and pan-Africanism. It’s still unclear how the materials are gathered and distributed collaboratively. (The materials seemed accumulated, categorized, and displayed through Gallon’s scholarly investments.)

Technologies & Skills

BPRC looks like a conventional blog (without interactive function or anything multimodally complex.) I think, to create and operate this kind of archive (which mainly provides the written information with a bit of supplementary analysis of material using the methods in Digital Humanities), one needs to know HTML and Data Visualization tools.   

Learning from the BPRC (for future projects)

BPRC’s focus on global black press (tied to the historical conditions of African Diasporas) is admirably meaningful and ambitious, and its pursuit of new methodologies (for dispersed subjects and specificities) sounds adequate for a digital scholarship in that area of study. However, I’m not sure how much this project is materialized as a collaborative project of using researchers and resources from everywhere (in various languages) across the globe. I haven’t got in touch with the creator/director of the archive, but I’m curious to know the strategies of outreach for this archive as it appears that the archive couldn’t solicit decentralized contributions from other interested researchers and scholars.      

In the Spotlight: Reflections on the British Library’s Latest Transcription Crowdsourcing Project

By Evangeline Athanasiou. March 1, 2021

The problem: As we continue to make advancements in optical character recognition (OCR) technology, there are still circumstances that require the human eye’s capacity for nuanced visual recognition. In the case of hundreds of thousands of texts needing transcription, where can an organization find the time and resources to complete the task? The solution: crowdsourcing.

In 2017, the British Library acted upon their need to create transcriptions of a collection of playbills spanning the mid-eighteenth to twentieth centuries in order to make them easily searchable online. Because of their combination of different fonts, text sizes, and weights within single paragraphs and even sentences, these playbills rendered available OCR applications powerless. And, as an additional complication, even with the resources of an institution like the British Library, dedicating staff hours to transcribing these playbills (234,000 total) would cost too much and take far too long. However, without transcription, the metadata required to make these valuable resources accessible to researchers would remain incomplete. What now?

Enter In the Spotlight.

Image of the British Library’s In the Spotlight homepage. Screenshot by author.

Key personnel from the British Library’s Digital Scholarship and Printed Heritage teams came together to create a user-friendly crowdsourcing platform that invites curious amateurs and inquiring professionals to transcribe these digitized playbills piece by piece. By breaking down the transcription process into simple, clearly defined steps with plenty of examples as aids, In the Spotlight welcomes contributions ranging from the transcription of one title to a century’s worth of genres. Any contributors that are interested in sharing their findings, ideas, or problems while performing transcriptions are encouraged to do so through the discussion forum, which is also an excellent way to get feedback directly from the project’s founder, Dr. Mia Ridge.

In the Spotlight is part of the Library’s larger LibCrowds platform and uses an open-source crowdsourcing framework, PyBossa, in combination with a custom theme interface created through a JavaScript framework, Vue.js. The images of the playbills are made available through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which provides a set of standards for the optimal accessibility of digital images across various platforms. While these resources require their users’ understanding of the basics of their programming languages and standardized terminology, each provides a wealth of resources explaining their functionality and providing examples of their practical application.

By facilitating scholarly practice through transparent communication and meaningful engagement with the public, In the Spotlight exemplifies an impactful collaborative project in the digital humanities.