I’m planning to apply for a fellowship with Getty Research Institute (especially with their new initiative of African American art history) in a few years and after substantially modifying this proposal when my institutional position becomes rather stable. However, since the application material or research/project plan should be confidential until the moment of acceptance, I’m really reluctant to share the detail of my archival project here on the Commons. Instead of talking about the content of my proposal, I’d just like to address why I decided to apply for this particular fellowship coming from my backgrounds.

As I perhaps implied in my previous blog post (when talking about Beauford Delaney’s letters), I’m quite interested in African American artists (especially, queer or queer feminist) whose works are intersecting with the history of letters or otherwise epistolary writings. While researchers in literary criticism have been approaching artists’ letters more for the content or the transcription of the content, I’m more interested in highlighting the low art forms, undecodable secrets, and odd or campy mythology in artists’ letter writings. Fortunately, Getty’s new initiative (on African American art history) recently acquired the archive (including manuscripts and letters) of Los Angeles artist Betye Saar whose work is in line with my “underground” inclinations. I’ve been wanting to work with Getty’s as they are capable to pursue both analog and digital projects but I couldn’t really find a suitable fellowship where I would be able to contribute my training both in literature and film/video studies. And now that Getty owns the archive of significant portion of Saar’s writings, it feels rather comforting that I don’t have to resolve the copy right issues of artist’ objects. Also, I will partly pursue a digital project using my research and writing on a certain aspect of Saar’s work (which I won’t address here), working amidst the dirt of this physical archive (which needs much sorting and curation from now on) feels almost pastorally intimate and expansive to me.

Obtaining Getty’s fellowship in any kind isn’t easy, however. All of them are prestigious fellowships that many of PhDs and tenured professors in Art History seek after establishing their careers to some extent. My strength (as a Comparative Literature PhD), unlike most of art history PhDs, can be probably found in my scholarship and training with letters and notebooks as well as archival video art and oral history projects. And I have worked with some of artists’ archives for their publications which engage with artists’ writing and digital art, so I feel equipped to be a fellow with this initiative. I don’t feel comfortable to address my qualifications here, so I’m shortly closing my blog post. Anyhow, I’m excited to think of an opportunity of being in proximity to the physical archive while producing something digital out of it for Getty’s exhibition toward the public. Additionally, Getty’s African American art initiative is focused on collaboration with other institutions, so I feel that my project will be benefited by working with various scholars coming from other partnered archives.

As I’m writing the grant proposal for the Neighborhood Stories Indexing Project, I am encountering some challenges that – I think – are not specific to my project. I’ll list them here, in the hope that my fellow grant-writers might have some answers to my questions, and that it might help them feel less alone is their process.

1. I realized that writing about a digital project in a simple, accessible language is harder than I thought. After being immersed in three semesters of DH terminology, trying to explain an online indexing project feels like explaining technology to my parents (I know you all can relate!). I think this is a common problem in academia: we are so focused on our field, we mostly talk about it with people in our field, and it never occurs to us that the “outside world” might have some trouble understanding DH, DMPs, GIS, topic modeling, and all the terms that are very familiar to us.
   Any tips on this? I am still trying to write as if I’m explaining this project to my mom – with the added goal of getting some money for the project. Easy enough, right?
2. Writing a grant forces you to think about EVERY phase of your project, even the ones you can’t really predict yet, or the ones you didn’t want to think about (who enjoys writing a Data Management Plan, seriously). I guess it’s also a good thing: when I wrote the proposal for the NYC Community Fridge Archive, it worked as a good roadmap for the DH Praxis class. Hopefully, once classes and the showcase are over, I’ll be able to sit with my thoughts and figure out the phases of the project I have no idea about.
3. Writing a grant is HARD. It’s time-consuming, boring, and lonely, and it makes me appreciate everyone who’s ever won a grant because man, it is not fun to write one. I think that part of the problem is that I’m used to working on Neighborhood Stories with a team of people: having to be by myself and write about a collective effort seems weird. I know that for the actual grant proposal I’ll have the support of the Neighborhood Stories team, but this phase feels harder because I don’t have someone to share my ideas and doubts with.
4. I realized I’m taking myself WAY too seriously. For some reason, the fact that I’m writing a grant proposal and not a paper puts so much pressure on this assignment. I wish we had had some low-stakes assignments to write parts of a proposal, so that the task to write a whole Narrative wouldn’t feel so overwhelming now. I am trying to think about this assignment as the first draft of the grant proposal, but being a perfectionist, it’s still challenging to take the pressure off the task.

With this said, I’m looking forward to the project presentations tonight. I’m sure everyone will do great!

Picking up from my last post, I will focus on the design and curatorial decisions for my project. While looking through the Baker scans, I started to sketch out my site’s design and what it will include. I chose WordPress through the Academic Commons since I am familiar with it and I want to include more text than images. My minimum requirements are: 

• 4 of Baker’s Bibliographies (digital)
• Selected children’s books (digital)
• Selections from Baker’s Archive (paper to digital)
• History of children’s books leading up to Baker’s Bibliographies
• Biography of Baker
• Resources for students and librarians (links to websites and current bibliographies)

Since the bibliographies are the focus, I had to figure out how to best display them. I wanted the bibliographies to look like a book, so I used 3D Flipbook (WordPress plugin) and created a book from the PDFs I downloaded from NYPL. I chose this because some of Baker’s bibliographies are not available digitally through NYPL. I can now download from other resources (like DPLA) and they will all look the same. Underneath the bibliography is text that highlights what was happening in the publishing world and the U.S. at that time, along with pieces from Baker’s collection that connect to the bibliography and her editing process. I thought about using Flipbook for the children’s books, but I knew that would create unneeded work for myself. There are also a lot of great collections that have the books along with additional resources that would be beneficial to my users. Those repositories deserve to have their work viewed. Selected books from the bibliographies are hyperlinked in the text, along with why they are important. I only have 2 bibliographies on the site right now, but have the children’s books and text ready to paste. 

Deciding what children’s books to include was difficult, since the majority of early picks were from White creators. It makes sense, since Black creators were so few and often not picked up by major publishing houses. I made a decision early on to include as many Black creators as possible in my project, especially since it was a Black woman who created the bibliographies. Altman’s Black Women in the Archive and the editing choices made for the Black Women’s Suffrage collection reinforced my decision. “To combat this disparity in the Black Women’s Suffrage collection we strove to include as many materials about Black women as possible, and limit the number of materials about White people and men.  We did not want to exclude White and male voices from the collection, because they provide important context for Black women’s experiences”  The White creators I did include wrote inclusive books and often collaborated with Black creators. 

I had a brief biography of Baker ready to upload, so it was time to work on the history of children’s books leading up to the bibliographies. Books in the early 1900s promoted harmful portrayals of Black people, and it took decades for these books to be removed from circulation or edited (Little Black Sambo). I wanted to include images of books in my text, but I was concerned about highlighting harmful stereotypes on the site. Duncan and Lisa pointed this out as well in our meetings, so I struggled with what to do. I decided to follow Curator Shanee Yvette Murain’s plan (Altman) of including racist materials because they provide important historical context, but I limited it to two images. I provide links to sources that provide more information for those interested, but I will not go into more detail on the site. 

My final and most daunting task is uploading items from Baker’s collection. I am grateful to USC for sending me the scans, but those I am interested in using are blurry or too light/dark to make out. I also believe they have a copy of the first bibliography (1938) which is not available at NYPL and the one I wanted to have on the site. I would love to make a trip to the archive so I can see everything in person. I debated whether to include the images I found in my site, but decided including them would illustrate the importance of digitizing the collection and this project overall. A friend recommended an open source version of Adobe Photoshop, but I don’t think I will have enough time to figure it out and edit the images. I have spoken with USC about digitizing, and explained my project a bit more to them. They are encouraging, which I hope will lead to a successful collaboration. Only two weeks left, and so much to do!

One reading that most resonated with me in this seminar would be David Kazanjian’s piece “Scenes of Speculation” from the week 2 (alas, a long time ago by now). Though, at the end of this post, I will also warn myself of a peril of elusive, ambivalent, or even opaque interpretation of ownership in a trendy archival practice, I admittedly felt attuned to what the author suggests and elucidates in their essay. I have been reading the Harlem Renaissance (and later Parisian expatriate) painter Beauford Delaney’s calligraphy in his letters in an interdisciplinary mode of attending to their sonic (and otherwise textual) composition, perhaps akin to Kazanjian’s Derridean practice. Since I have an essay in progress on this subject right now, I can’t describe the crux of my interrogation but my method could be also called “speculative”. (Note: A few weeks ago I decided to not pursue the archival project of Delaney’s handwritten letters and notebooks due to the copyright issues and I felt fine with it. Generally, I like to fully respect the ownership of works by marginalized artists and even relatively unknown persons, and I don’t think love for the public scholarship or open-ended interpretation of the archival material is more important than honoring that ownership especially siding with the historically or culturally dispossessed. I gave up only the public reproduction of those manuscripts but I can still write about my research, so everything feels fair to me.)

As Kazanjian proposes, paying attention to the ambiguous dimensions of textual and also often quotidian aspects of documents (rather than the authenticity of obvious records) from an archive can indeed benefit a researcher with the critical profundity of questioning the seemingly transparent values of notions such as freedom, sovereignty, citizenship, and even the self and desire. In so doing, the archival object becomes a speculative object that propels thinking heterogeneously or under-commonly (if this word makes sense at all) about history and memory against the moral or societal dogma about the past and the time to unfold. In this seminar, I think, we reflected on the most of archival objects in this direction despite the variations of the archival contexts. Especially, in approaching to the archival material inscribed by socially abandoned or imputed subjects (such as fugitives, refugees, and otherwise migrants), we learned how we can envision a sensitive or politically aesthetic relationship to the ambiguity of struggle and hope (or even dream) nuanced or obscured in the material.

However, unlike what Kazanjian repeats, I cannot overstate the importance of the ownership of archival materials as well as the tangible records of the subjects involved in those records. Post-structuralism (Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Blanchot and many more) that Kazanjian and other researchers (including myself) trained in literary criticism and continental philosophy take even in their archival practice is largely a product of white labor for their own knowledge and pleasure of complex discourse. While there is a critical benefit of the speculative mode of archival intervention in ways of seeing a layer of history and consciousness in the objects, I don’t think that should be an intellectual excuse to diffuse the ownership of objects and ethical (or even spiritual) desire attached to the objects on the side of the dispossessed or the oppressed who made or will make them.

As a classicist and an archaeologist, I love learning about different cultures and how there could be similarities between two cultures that never interacted with one another. The myths and legends of different cultures can sometimes be taken from older traditions or could be related without any connections that archaeology can determine. One example of this is the widespread flood myth. Many cultures all over the world and throughout history have had some form of flood myth. Within western civilization, there are a few myths that are well known and studied the most such as those of Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Sumerian, and Israeli cultures. As a Latina, however, I wanted to focus on non-western flood myths, more specifically those of Mesoamerica.

I decided to focus on Mesoamerica as a starting point as opposed to focusing on all of Central and South America just to get a sense of what information was already available and because I felt like I tend to not hear a lot of history about Central America compared to South America (just in a personal way). I have some roots in Central America, yet I know nothing about its history, and this was a way for me, as well, to learn a bit more about it.

With a lot of the readings that we had in this class as well as the other class I was taking this semester (Digital Pedagogy 2), there were discussions of lack of ownership that peoples of the Global South had for their own content such as OERs or digital archives (thinking back to the Danish West Indies archive from this class). Much of the content within the OERs or digital archives would be from the Global North or referencing scholarship from the Global North. To try to combat this cycle of learning, I wanted to focus on cultures from the Global South and hope that this project/platform helps to bring other cultures into the mainstream scholarship world.

My project will be a digital archive that will pull together flood myths from across Mesoamerica and artifacts from those cultures that may relate to the flood myths. The items and stories will be displayed as an interactive map and timeline visualization that will show where and when these flood myths appeared. In the future, I hope to partner with museums and culture centers in Mesoamerica to allow for individuals to provide their own flood myths they may have heard (since many of the stories are still oral history) and continue to add artifacts or stories that may not be digitized yet.