Exploring Enslaved.org: A Digital Archive of the Slave Trade
This project is a remarkable digital platform that is designed to reconstruct and honor the lives of individuals impacted by the transatlantic slave trade. It offers the users a nice opportunity to explore data on enslaved people, slave owners, and others who were involved in the historical slave economy. By combining large amounts of historical records and data, the website enables visitors to trace biographical sketches, events, places, and narratives related to slavery. The most interesting thing about this project is this made stories of enslaved people more accessible. Through interconnected datasets, users can search(https://enslaved.org/search/) into names, origins, and experiences, building detailed historical profiles. The platform mainly focuses on ethical scholarship, making useful approach to studying slavery, grounded in inclusivity and responsibility for handling the data of historically oppressed individuals.
On the other hand this project serves as an educational resource, offering visualizations (https://enslaved.org/explore/visualizations/), timelines, and stories that bring the realities of the past to life. There are some charts and looking at them at a glance you get to know so many stuff. For example from the bar charts it is visible that highest number of the male slaves were of age 30 whereas for female it was age 20. These tools are great ways to engage with the legacy of slavery in a meaningful way. The platform not only reveals the horrors of the slave trade but also aims to restore dignity to the individuals whose lives were stolen by this brutal institution.
This Digital Humanities project reflects the effort by historians and digital scholars to engage with history through technology. It bridges the gap between historical research and public access, offering a repository for data-driven(https://enslaved.org/data/) insights into slavery’s human impact. Researchers can use this archive to study the intersections of people, places, and events in the slave trade, contributing to a deeper understanding of the global reach of slavery.
In this ongoing preservation and scholarly collaboration, this project ensures that these stories will not be forgotten. To conclude I can say that, in an era where understanding our collective history is very important and necessary, this platform stands as a tool for justice, education, and remembrance.
SongData
SongData (https://songdata.ca/) is a DH project started in 2018 at the University of Ottawa by Jada Watson and Andre Vellino to collect music industry data about country music songs to examine the inner workings of how the genre has developed over time, how it is still changing, and how its growth connects more broadly with cultural frameworks that emerge around it. The project began with a need to understand inequalities in the radio playtime of women country artists: during a 2015 interview with radio consultant Keith Hill, he recommended that songs by female artists should comprise no more than 13%-15% of a station’s playlist. Hill described female artists as the “tomatoes” of the country music “salad.” SongData’s creators are looking to use this data to highlight gender discrimination in the country music genre by discovering trends and connections that could serve to keep songs by female artists low on the Hot Country Songs chart, and thus not as profitable as songs by male artists and groups.
There are almost 20,000 songs in the project’s database whose sales led to ranking on Billboard magazine’s Hot Country Songs singles chart, from 1944 to the present. The data for each single includes the artist, writer, producer, record label, and album, as well as the names and contributions of sound engineers and others who contributed to making the single. The creators note that there is simultaneously a clear bias against artists of color, including Indigenous performers in the genre, and they are working to use the data to help illustrate this discrimination as well.
SongData uses several music industry databases to collect discographical and biographical information about the singles on the Hot Country Songs chart. SongData creators use a Python script and RapidMiner to discover and analyze connections among music industry professionals that might have helped shape the genre over the years. The SongData will be free to anyone interested in doing additional research about the development of the country music genre in the US. To date, they have completed a dataset of discographic and biographic information about charting country music singles from 1987-2017, and they published their first findings in 2019.
What SongData is able to do is to quickly identify connections among record industry professionals and trends in sales of country music singles. This data is drawn from several sources, and thus is best and most easily discovered through the use of digital gathering and analysis. One shortcoming of the project is that, because of licensing agreements, they are not able to publish the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts. While the analyses of the data can definitely help researchers spot trends and connections, being able to view the actual movement of the singles on the charts themselves would add weight to the project’s findings. This project definitely has the potential to look at other genres in the music industry and discover more about how music genres are shaped behind the scenes.
Data and Data Tools Readings
I enjoyed the connections in this week’s readings about the nuances of data and digital tools: what they are, what they can show us, what they don’t reveal, how they both reflect and expose power imbalances, and how they can begin to correct some inequalities. Ramsay and Rockwell (2012) argue that digital tools are not simply performative but are themselves built theories, which are by design meant to facilitate further thought. Drucker (2011) discusses the contrasting terms “data” and “capta,” the difference being that traditional “data” are quantitative, fixed objects, things that are given–like counts, responses, actions–to represent the discrete. “Capta” on the other hand are described as things that are “taken” from those quantitative points. Drucker presents a variety of data expressed in bar and line graphs, and then layers “capta” over those graphs using subtleties of the original data, if the right questions are asked of it. Gallon (2016) writes that while some Black digital scholars are wary about embracing the digital tools that have been used to underrepresent and dehumanize Black people and culture, there is also the understanding how datasets, digital tools and platforms can be used to reveal racializations and inequitable systems of power, as well as recover artifacts and truths hidden or ignored through racism in scholarship. D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) show through Christine Draper’s famous use of what they call “data feminism” at NASA in the 1960s to crack the power hold of white male dominance in space engineering. And Posner (2014) describes how “sources” are extracted, processed and transformed to create digital presentations that engage viewers and invite further questions about their topics. This group of readings was a great introduction to what is at the deep heart of digital humanities, mutable and powerful as it is by nature.
Praxis# 1 – Analysis of the National AIDS Memorial Project
The AIDS Memorial was initiated in 1988 by a small San Francisco community devasted by the AIDS epidemic as a response to the stigma attached to the condition and the Reagan administration’s inaction against the growing health emergency. Currently the site features an intriguing amalgamation of materiality and the digital to memorialize the victims. The AIDS memorial Grove was first conceived by a small group of San Francisco residents as a serene place for healing and remembrance of loved ones lost to AIDS as well as to promote AIDS awareness. The team chose a neglected site at the Golden Gate Park and through the volunteering efforts of a dedicated team of architects and designers developed the unusable space into a timeless living memorial that exemplifies civic beautification and urban-park restoration undertaken by a public-private partnership. Over the years thousands of volunteers from diverse racial, economic, cultural backgrounds cleared the overgrowth, reintroduced native species and constructed a landscape including six flagstone gathering areas, as well as designated areas such as the Circle of Friends, the Artist’s Portal, the Hemophilia Circle, several Sierra granite boulders, crescents, and benches designed to carry engravings of tributes to affected individuals and organizations. In 1996, the Grove was designated as the nation’s AIDS Memorial.
In 2019, another massive memorial project that is considered one of the largest community arts project, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, was brought under the stewardship of the National AIDS Memorial. The Quilt was the brainchild of human rights activist, Cleve Jones, who created the first panel in memory of his friend and formally organized the NAMES Project Foundation in 1987. The first display of the Quilt with 1920 panels was in 1987 at Washington D.C. and was as large as a football field. An ongoing annual tradition of reading the memorialized names emphasizes the goals of remembrance and awareness shared by both projects. The Quilt has since travelled to each of the fifty States and several other countries, growing as new panels were constantly added and today stands at nearly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 individuals.
The digital landscape include videos and documented stories of the individuals and AIDS support institutions memorialized in the Grove. An interactive searchable AIDS Quilt facilitates engagement with a wider audience and an online locator feature allows viewers to find Quilt displays in their area. Another offshoot, Surviving Voices is a multi-year project oral history project launched in 2015 that records, curates and preserves the untold stories captured in the Quilt.
The memorials are maintained and developed by community labor facilitated by regular volunteer workdays attracting enthusiastic participation under professional supervision and leadership. The website features directions, links and kits with guidance on adding an inscription to the Grove site, making/ adding a panel to the Quilt, hosting a Quilt display and the interactive AIDS Quilt feature that enables wider community participation. The memorials function as truly collaborative projects and provide a global platform to marginalized voices aligning with digital humanity goals of inclusivity and social change through activism as well as propagate DH values of open exchange of ideas, collaboration and connectedness. The initiative continues its efforts to feature underrepresented communities by adding chapters in the oral history project for Black, Latinx, transgender and AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander) communities and organizing special Quilt displays to honor Black and Latinx lives as a way to raise awareness about the disproportionate impact on these communities. The diversity of the participating volunteers and the outreach to include different communities are in line with DH values.
The memorial has a named board and small staff that includes professionals with extensive philanthropical/service experience, a Quilt conservator, a Quilt curator and members who have lost loved ones to AIDS. The sponsoring partners include biopharmaceutical companies, energy sector, health and diagnostics companies, the Library of Congress and the city of San Francisco.
The source code indicates that the website was built using Webflow, software provided by a San Francisco based company. The use of a software not requiring coding experience and the repetitive links in some of the Grove webpages suggest reuse of source code and the probability that the design team could be part of the nameless volunteer community. A few broken links and the occasional lack of cohesive design indicates that the Quilt pages were probably integrated from the archived Quilt website. There are minor hiccups that indicate a slight delay in updates on the massive website. For instance, the online locator shows three Quilt displays in NY including the Whitney Museum of Art, but the object is not featured on the museum website.
Having said that both the physical memorials and the digital components have been sustained and developed at such a massive scale over the past several years, depending solely on community labor and the generosity of public and private institutions which in itself is a testament to the resounding success of the AIDS Memorial’s mission to never forget.
Lesbian Herstory Archives Audio/Visual Collections Project Analysis
http://herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/
The Lesbian Herstory Archives is a volunteer organization that is collectively run and located in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The contents of the archives are varied and come from all over the globe with the goal to document the widest range of lesbian experience from all geographic, cultural, political, and economic backgrounds. The archives are huge, apparently one of the oldest and largest archives dedicated to lesbian history with more than 10,000 volumes, 1,400 periodicals, 12,000 photographs, 500 pulp novels, and many collections of original manuscripts and person archival material. Their website hosts a calendar that gives times for researchers and visitors to come by. I would say on average the archives are open approximately 10 hours per week. The Archive is in a nondescript brownstone on a quiet street in Park Slope. Inside there are rooms filled with books, tapes, personal collections of t-shirts, boxes and boxes of interviews, etc. From personal experience it can be a little overwhelming – where to start, what to look at. Given the fairly limited times the archive is open, one wouldn’t want to waste precious research time digging through stacks to find relevant material. This is where the LHA Audio Visual Collections come in.
The Lesbian Herstory Archives Audio Visual Collections project aims to categorize and digitize a variety of audio visual formats and make them publicly available. The LHA Audio Visual Archive has digitized over 385 hours of content, mostly from the 1970s and into the 1980s. I think the very nature of the project, digitizing archival material, so that a larger audience can access it makes this a digital humanities project. Prior to digitization these tapes and collections remain accessible to a small number of people. Of the values laid out by Lisa Spiro in her essay “This is Why We Fight”: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities – openness, collaboration, collegiality and connectedness, diversity, and experimentation – this project touches most obviously on openness and collaboration.
Openness – this project meets this value in DH because it is taking something that is physically walled off (though accessible should you be in the NYC area and have a way to get to the archive at a time when it is open) and making it available to a wider audience via the internet. I think this is one of the major strengths of this project. Even if I was able to go to the Archives and listen to the tapes while sitting at one of the tables there, it would take so much time and effort to sift through the tapes, listen to the content, and then decide which tapes were relevant to my project. The LHA Audio/Visual Collection digital archive makes the tapes easy to explore and allows researchers to sort through the material in a cohesive and organized way.
Collaboration – this project is worked on by those from the Pratt Institute School of Information (Professor Anthony Cocciolo and students). The work between the students and professor and volunteers at the archive (who are bringing in varied experiences themselves) make this project collaborative. My sister actually volunteered at the archives around 2012 and was responsible for cataloging tapes in the archives extensive collection. She told me she would listen to the tapes, write a summary of what they were about, and other important information. I wondered if she worked on any of these digitizations, but she could not remember.
The authors of this project converted the VHS tapes, U-Matic tapes, 1/4 inch open-reel tape, and compact audio cassettes into .wav preservation files and uploaded them to the digital archive as .mp3. I think the tools were chosen based on the subject matter. A quick google informed me that .wav files are used by archives for audio preservation because the audio file doesn’t go through any sort of compression (uncompressed), so the audio quality remains the same.
This is an ongoing project, adding 20-30 newly digitized items a year. I would love to see this project go on forever, but I worry the amount of time, energy, technical and financial resources associated with maintaining and building this project could be cumbersome and at some point could lead the site/project to be abandoned. I think this is a larger issue that has been touched on in our class readings that I am curious to learn more about. Additionally, I think that at some point we won’t have the technology to listen to the tapes. For example the authors noted that finding reliable equipment for the U-Matic tapes was challenging because the format is “endangered”. I am all but certain this will only continue to be a problem in the future with VHS, cassette tapes, etc.
*edited to add link to project website
What DH Means
Digital Humanities is the use of digital technologies to support research in the humanities. Through methods such as mapping, data mining, data visualization, digital projects, etc. Digital Humanities places an emphasis on collaborative research and open access, aiming to make information more accessible. The field of digital humanities is not free from bias. Like much of academia, it can also center Western perspectives in knowledge production. However, Digital Humanities also has the ability to transform and reshape traditional academic practices.
DH can be used as a form of resistance and as a tool to amplify voices and bring attention critical issues. For example, Torn Apart/Separados, is a digital humanities project that maps the detention of migrants and the separation of immigrant children from their families. Torn Apart brings attention to the network of ICE detention centers and systematic issues.
Another example, the Colored Conventions Project, connects scholars, librarians, both graduate and undergraduate researchers in a collaborative research project to archive the history of 19th century Black political organizing in the U.S. Histories that would have been forgotten are being revived through their joint efforts. The Early Caribbean Digital Archive, an open access archive of pre-twentieth century Caribbean history, similarly brings together interdisciplinary students and scholars to decolonize historical narratives. Both The Colored Conventions Project and Early Caribbean Digital Archive are examples of epistemic resistance by pushing back against the dominance of the “Global North” in academia.
DH
DH is a field where traditional methodologies of humanities discipline like literature, history and philosophy are merged with digital tools and technologies. The main goal is to explore newer ways of doing research , analysis and interpretation and presentation of humanities subjects. DH basically emphasizes the use of computational tools for processing big data sets, developing digital archives, creating interactive cultural content and also make visual representations of it.
The sites that were given all of them reflected key issues of DH field like, intersection of technology and social justice, historical recovery , public engagement and collaborative scholarship. The first site shows the visualization of data surrounding US immigration and Custom enforcement and detention centers mainly during 2018 crisis when at the US border the families were separated. In this project digital tools has been used to create a different visualization through which we understand historical and contemporary phenomena and the use of data visualization to make hidden information visible is the main issue of DH.
On the other hand the second site is about making pre-20th century Caribbean rare texts and culture available for public viewing. ECDA aims to use digital tools to “remix” the archive and foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afro-creole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world. So, it basically emphasizes the decolonial potential of DH by the use of digital tools to recover and amplify voices erased or silenced by traditional archives.
To conclude it can be said that each of these projects reflects DH’s commitment to inclusivity, open access, and the blending of digital tools with humanistic inquiry.
Carol Harris she/her (What Digital Humanities Mean )
Digital humanities is the marrying of computer science and informational technology with the humanities. Digital humanist use digital tools such as mapping, spatial and text analysis, social medial mining to assist with the study of history, geography, literature, language, music and other disciplines that fall under the umbrella of the humanities. Digital humanities allows us to study the past, present and future. Digital Humanities can also assess the role that social media media platform as it relates to the current political climate. With regards to subjects such as history, digital humanist can use technology to study historical documents, certificates, maps and the like.
Digital Humanities has been criticized for elevating certain forms of knowledge and technology notably the that align with the global north. Furthermore, even within the global north Digital humanities have been criticized for both ignoring gendered forms of knowledge and the role that women played in the development of such areas as algorithms and coding. DH has also been criticized ignoring the digital contributions of Blacks. In fact the the common experiences of Blacks across the African diaspora that is so broad in its scope and yet similar in their experiences warrants a separate interdisciplinary branch that falls somewhere between the Digital and the Humanities referred to as The Digital Black Atlantic.
In sum Digital Humanities is a growing field that is dynamic, open and collaborative
