A Day in the Life of a Digital Humanist: Day of DH 2015

May 19th’s Day of Digital Humanities 2015 (#DayofDH, #DayofDH2015) is over and done with, but I can’t resist the urge to participate for posterity! I love the concept behind this international project. Registered digital humanists everywhere document what they do in a work day, in order to crowd-source data that will be processed using digital humanities methods in order to provide us all with a better sense of what DH encompasses. It’s a DH feedback mechanism extraordinaire!

Even if it’s too late to provide a data point for the project, it’s important to make DH work visible. Although no two days in the life of a digital humanist are exactly alike, I would say that yesterday was pretty representative of my professional life these days. Here’s what I got up to:

Blogged about my Spring 2015 digital humanities class, “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition.” My post cites several student posts from our class blog.

Screenshot of our class blog for “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition.”

Wrote a description for the workshop on “Modernism and Digital Archives” that I’ll be leading at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference.

Themed graphic for the Modernist Studies Association 2015 Conference.

Here’s my description of the workshop: “This interactive workshop will focus on how to incorporate digital archives into research and teaching on modernism. Participants will 1) learn about digital archives and digitization initiatives pertinent to modernist studies; 2) mine selected digital archives and databases for primary source materials that speak to their research interests; and 3) learn strategies for incorporating these archives into their teaching.”

Tweeted out an article from the Southwestern University Department of Research and Digital Scholarship Twitter account (@SU_RADS) profiling Kathryn Stallard, Director of SU Special Collections, who is retiring this spring. The article features the grant-funded special collections digitization project Kathryn has spear-headed, and it links to the Digital Texas Heritage Resource Center Omeka site I’ve been working on (and which remains a work in progress!).

Communicated with colleagues in the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium about logistics for making a recording of a recent TxDHC webinar on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) publicly available on the TxDHC website. Matt Christy of Texas A&M has been the point of contact for the TxDHC website, while Jennifer Hecker of UT-Austin has been coordinating closed captioning for the webinar recording using Amara. Accessibility is one of the core values of the digital humanities, so we look forward to posting a video that is accessible to hearing-impaired users.

Screenshot of the landing page of the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website.

Conducted a quality control review of student digital archiving work conducted in my spring class for the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) collection at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI). Since students in my spring class transcribed, audited, formatted, and synced TAVP oral histories on the HRDI website, I play an intermediary role between the students and the HRDI archivists. I’m delighted to report that Kathryn Darnall, Digital Assets Management Intern at the HRDI, is very happy with the students’ work so far. I spent some time yesterday remedying problems with naming conventions in oral history transcripts that students input using GLIFOS digital archiving software.

Screenshot from the GLIFOS editing page on the Human Rights Documentation Initiative website.

In addition to the above, I wrote a slew of e-mails (naturally) and had some nice hallway chats with fellow library staff, including Head Research and Instruction Librarian Joan Parks, who clued me in to this webinar introduction to Native American primary source databases. All in all, it was an enchanting day of DH-related work and activities!

What did you do during Day of DH 2015? If you tweeted, blogged, or otherwise participated in Texas, consider logging in and linking as appropriate to this running list on the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium website. It would be great to get insights into a day in the life of DH across Texas.

“Connecting to the Ideologies that Surround Us”: English 10-714 Students Reflect on Digital Tools, Texts, and Narrative Itself

It’s been a whirlwind of a semester in “English 10-714: Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition: A Multidisciplinary Approach”! Now that the class has drawn completely to a close–all digital projects and reflective essays turned in, grades submitted, and digital archiving commitments to the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP), the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI), and the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) wrapped up–I’d like to report on some themes that emerged from students’ final reflective posts on our course blog. The students’ reflections not only provide immensely useful considerations as I look forward to future adventures teaching digital humanities; they also provide great insights into what the digital humanities can do and be in undergraduate liberal arts education.

The TAVP partners with the HRDI to make oral histories pertaining to the death penalty in Texas digitally available to the public. As a class, we digitally archived approximately 15 hours of oral history testimony.

In addition to regularly blogging, tweeting, and building independent digital projects using platforms such as Annotation Studio, Tiki-Toki, Omeka, and HistoryPin, our class transcribed 17 prison essays for the American Prison Writing Archive and digitally archived a whopping 15 hours of oral history testimony for the Texas After Violence Project. In this time- and labor-intensive enterprise, students took responsibility for transcribing, auditing, formatting, and synching transcripts with video for five oral history narrators whose stories are collected at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. Students also created tables of contents and abstracts for the interviews, which will be made available to the public pending finalization by HRDI archivists.

I commend the students of English 10-714 for their openness to experimenting not only with new digital technologies, but also with traditional notions of genre and narrative. The multidisciplinary goals of the class–to deepen our understanding of how freedom, imprisonment, and criminal justice have been variously conceptualized in the U.S. imaginary–called for a broadly construed understanding of the “prison narrative.” While we encountered many texts that comport directly with the genre conventions of the prison narrative (including readings from Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America edited by Doran Larson, and pieces archived at the American Prison Writing Archive), we also encountered texts that challenged us to expand our idea of what the “prison narrative” might be, to include ostensibly non-narrative texts as well as the perspectives of writers and narrators far outside prison walls. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, oral histories from family members of victims of crimes, the documentary Crime After Crime directed by Yoav Potash, and speeches by Angela Davis enriched our discussions of the generic boundaries of the prison narrative. Over the course of the semester, we framed our humanities inquiry in terms of questions like these:

Explored collectively and comparatively, how do these multidisciplinary texts narrate shifting ideologies with regard to U.S. criminal justice?
Whether explicitly narrative or not, what stories do these texts tell about about how criminal justice policies and practices impact people and communities inside prisons and beyond?
What do these texts reveal about the power of narrative to establish, sustain, overturn, or transform widely held assumptions about prisons and the imprisoned?

One student wrote that reflecting on the semester, “I see narrative in everything that we have read and watched and listened to. I learned a great deal about how the narratives Americans are exposed to about imprisonment and punishment have a great impact on how we view prison — views that I saw in myself, and that have definitely been impacted the way that I think about punishment in general.” Another student remarked that our course readings “destroyed the dissociation that I have had with those that are incarcerated and rather humanized them.” Yet another student concluded that “the work of listening and contextualizing that needs to be done around crime… broadens the discourse around capital punishment by urging us to think about corporal and mental punishment, almost akin to death, perpetuated by prisons… While we need to fight for reform and specific policy changes, there needs to be a vast overhaul of this system.” These students’ reflections, as well as many others not cited here, evidence how effectively our course readings challenged students to confront their own assumptions, beliefs, and thoughts about future directions with regard to U.S. imprisonment practices.

In their thinking about the power of narratives to register and react to U.S. criminal justice, students cited a range of texts as favorites, but oral histories at the Texas After Violence Project and the Rule of Law Oral History Project reigned in the students’ appreciation. Students interacted with audiovisual oral histories using this Close Listening Worksheet as a basis for analysis. They also interacted with TAVP oral histories by transcribing, auditing, and archiving them for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative TAVP Collection. As one student remarked,

“Oral history interviews were my favorite types of texts to work with and analyze. I really liked being able to see a face to a narrative and hear the voice behind the story…. It was a way to get closer to the content and analyze it on many levels. I was able to draw different responses from these type of texts that I wouldn’t be able to draw from something in print.”

Another student agreed, commenting that the “oral history aspect of the project was very affecting…, and I am glad this class exposed me to oral history projects, as I was previously unfamiliar. Watching people talk about their own experiences and beliefs, being able to see them process their own thoughts, is powerful in a different way than a carefully crafted story or essay.” The student added that the Rule of Law Oral History Project provided him with a valuable access point to “the philosophy surrounding law,” since the project includes diverse perspectives from “experts, activists, psychologists, and those who have personally experienced extralegal detainment or torture.”

With regard to oral histories, yet another student put forth “two specific nuggets of knowledge I learned in class: new ways of close-reading (transcribing, auditing, etc.) and the activist power of narratives.” For this student and others, the values of interactive close-reading and community engagement were closely tied in our interactions with digital oral history collections.

Following are some further themes that emerged in student reflections on course learning outcomes, demonstrated with more quotes from their blog posts.

How digital archives, digital archiving practices, and digital tools introduced new ways of close-reading and enhanced interactivity with course texts and topics:

“Although we were already engaging with the texts in such an analytical way this course pushed us to a different level. Using digital technology to annotate, archive, respond to, and discuss texts we were thinking about the texts in so many different ways. All the different forms of digital technology gave us different insights to what we were working with and helped us communicate our thoughts about the texts with others.”

With reference to archiving TAVP oral histories and transcribing APWA essays: “This type of close reading deals with the narrative/text physically… obviously, for literature classes, reading is that physical activity, but often times it is hard to engage with a text and read every, single, word. But when transcribing, auditing, or syncing a narrative, it is almost necessary to overly pay attention to every word—therefore another way to close-read texts. Looking at texts and narratives by using digital technology in class, has been a valuable avenue to deal with texts in a new way.”

How working with digital tools and texts enriched our conception of narrative and shifted students’ relationships to narrative:

“Poetry, oral narratives, scholarly articles, and even documentaries are all some ways we’ve explored the prison narratives in our course this semester… When we think about a text we think about something in print or online that can be read but this course taught us to broaden the term “text” in such an interesting way…We focused on the content but also on the media that we received the text from.”

“All of the tools and texts we have worked with this semester have made me start thinking differently about the act of reading and listening. Reading is not a passive activity, as I had once thought. Putting my responses down on paper (or rather, a blog) made me realize just how much I reflected during the reading process. I was not simply taking in information; I was interpreting it and forming new information. The same goes with the act of listening. Transcribing and auditing another person’s words makes them seem like your own, which is an interesting feeling. As a reader and a listener, I have been able to understand an author or narrator’s point of view much more quickly and with a much more open mind than I did before this class… We are connecting not just to each other, but to the ideologies that surround us.”

“[T]ranscribing pieces [was] a deeply new thing for me. The first time I listened to the Jeff Hood interview [at the Texas After Violence Project], I found myself enjoying his story, questioning his motives, finding places where his activism plays into other systems of power that I have been taught about, and absorbing the story but not being changed by it. After auditing, and syncing this interview I found a new take on it entirely. The places that I would write off from his story because it doesn’t align with my experience (whether seeming unbelievable or merely not recognizable), in the end became the parts that really stretched me a lot… Normally, I would only listen to a long video such as this over and over again if I wanted to remember it, share it, somehow take ownership of it. But what I found with the Jeff Hood interview was that I engaged with the story not because I wanted to use it, but because it was a voice that mattered and it was my job to listen.”

How social media challenged student writers, enhanced community in our class, and connected us with communities beyond our class:

“Using Twitter as a productive and efficient way to respond to the “texts” we worked with made it really easy to attach other media aspects to what we were already talking about and add a more “real” feel to it all. We could join in conversation with current events and topics on Twitter and tie them into what we were thinking about in class.”

“While I enjoyed the use of a popular social media platform such as Twitter, I found it particularly challenging to narrow my thoughts down to 140 characters. This challenge made me think more carefully about each word and letter used in order to effectively and concisely make my point. I think it was very beneficial, however, to have all the thoughts in one place such as the feed. In other classes that require daily or weekly responses, it is usually for the professor’s benefit and is not shared with the rest of the class.”

“[A]t first I really disliked having to comment on weekly readings via Twitter, because of the extremely limited space, but eventually I realized that most of what I disliked was the way that the short format pushed me to very carefully consider my thoughts, and condense them into the best, purest form possible.”

How working with digital technologies and digital narratives opened up possibilities for advocacy, activism, and community engagement:

“Narratives are crucial aspects of activism. Reading someone’s story—being placed in someone’s metaphorical shoes by reading their work—creates a bond; and then this bond creates a meaningful connection for the person to the narrator. Therefore, I think that learning about injustices of the prison industrial complex through narratives like the TAVP [oral histories], the Rule of Law Oral History Project…, Fourth City: Essays from the Prisons in America and our other course texts—completely achieve this goal, of creating a bond with the reader.”

“The tools we have interacted with… have shown me the depth of accessibility for a wide variety of audiences that comes along with open air digital blogs and projects, and that is a necessary hinge of activism.”

Relatedly and in conclusion, one student reflected that in our “class about freedom and imprisonment,” she was frequently struck by the fact that her “own access to information and digital tools is very apparently a rare privilege.” Over the course of listening to audiovisual oral histories, reading from texts such as Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, and Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons, and as a result of our class’ volunteer relationship with the Inside Books Project, our class learned that access to texts, oral histories, and other digital media is an important measure of freedom. By the same token, the lack of access to educational tools and texts faced by many people in prisons is a major factor of their imprisonment.

Update, May 22, 2015: Course evaluations are in! Following are some of the problems, issues, and challenges that students identified in the class. Some of these were articulated in their blog posts as well, so I’ll synthesize them here:

The emotional component of the class. The controversial course topic, sensitive course material, and provocative voices and perspectives we encountered in course texts sometimes made for an emotionally charged classroom experience.

With the exception of the final project, in which students selected a digital platform from which to conduct a literary analysis, the digital skill-building did not always interact with the literary texts. Over the course of the semester, we learned Annotation Studio, Omeka, Tiki-Toki, and HistoryPin in preparation for the final project assignment. This, in addition to learning video-editing skills and the digital archiving software GLIFOS, was indeed a lot (probably too much) to cover, in light of our heavy reading load, regular social media contributions, and task sessions for the Texas After Violence Project and the American Prison Writing Archive. Several students suggested spending less time on skill-building, and more time independently applying selected digital tools to course texts.

Assessment. Assessment is a big issue in both digital humanities and community-engaged classrooms, and ours was both. While I provided consistent feedback to students in the form of individual responses to blog posts and tweets, project management e-mails and meetings in and out of class with regard to tasks for the TAVP and the APWA, an in-class digital project proposal workshop, one-on-one consultations on final digital projects, and in-depth written responses to final projects, I did not assign grades until the end of the class. For the most part, students responded well to this format. Our class had great momentum. Every student completed all requirements for the class, quite a number of them going well above and beyond. But some student evaluations indicated that the gradelessness of the class was a challenge.

I take seriously issues of assessment in a course where the work does not neatly correspond to a system of letter grades. The question of how to assess digital scholarship and community-engaged learning looms large at this juncture in higher ed. Is it a matter of channeling student work into grade categories no matter what and however uneasily? Is it a matter of front-loading the class with extensive discussion about how their work will be valued and evaluated outside of the traditional grading system? What are the best strategies for providing students with the feedback they need to learn and succeed in the digital humanities/community-engaged classroom? This semester was undoubtedly a valuable experiment for me as an educator when it comes to assessment. The students’ feedback has provided me with a lot of important food for thought, and I look forward to implementing their suggestions in future teaching.

More immediately, I look forward to connecting with other educators and taking on questions of assessment in my upcoming presentation centered on my spring class at the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) 2015 Conference taking place at Michigan State University May 27-30. My panel, titled “Thinking Outside the Archive: Engaging Students and Community in Special Collections Digital Projects,” will be a great opportunity to talk through issues of assessment with educators and archivists facing similar challenges.

“An Out-Of-This-Classroom Experience”: Students Engage with the Texas After Violence Project

As part of our ongoing partnership with the Texas After Violence Project in “English 10-714: Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition: A Multidisciplinary Approach,” students in the class recently completed an orientation session on GLIFOS Social Media, the digital archiving software used by the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) in order to host digital primary source collections. Kathryn Darnall, Digital Asset Management Intern at the HRDI, provided us with a comprehensive yet highly accessible overview of GLIFOS, including many opportunities for students to interact with the technology and experiment with its functions.

Screenshot from the GLIFOS page for a TAVP interview with Ireland Beazley. Students will input metadata on editing pages like this one in order to make interviews available on the public page of the HRDI.

Student responses to the GLIFOS orientation on our class blog highlighted the centrality of digital archiving tasks to our class’s commitment to community engagement. In one post, titled “An Out-Of-This-Classroom Experience,” a student commented, “This is a chance for me to gain valuable skills about real-life computer technology. More than that, I am most excited about the chance to do something substantial for an organization outside of an academic setting.” Another student pointed out that while participating in digital archiving tasks advances the TAVP mission, just as importantly, these tasks enhance liberal arts education:

“Even though the main goal of working with the TAVP is to help a non-profit and engage in activism, which I personally believe is central to feminist studies, as students, when we transcribe or create a table of contents for the video, we are better able to engage, critically think, and basically have a more meaningful interaction with the TAVP videos.”

Both student blog contributors mentioned the insights they are gaining into the profound “ripple effects” of the death penalty throughout Texas communities. One student blogged that at this point in the class’s work with the TAVP,

“I have been able to expand my perceived web of peoples affected by the death penalty. First it starts with the victim and the person sentenced, then to the family of the victim, then extending towards the perpetrator’s family, next to the lawyers on both sides of the case, after that the jurors of the case, and somewhere in between, the friends of the victim/perpetrator and witnesses of the crime. I hope that my understanding of this web continues to expand through more experiences with the TAVP.”

Another student blogger echoed this sentiment:

“I am most excited about working with the Texas After Violence Project because of the vast array of perspectives they collect regarding the death penalty… Since I am interested in a career in the field of law, whether that be as a lawyer or a law enforcement agent, I am excited to be able to learn concrete ways the legal system effects not only those incarcerated but the ripple effect it has on family and friends as well.”

In addition to completing the GLIFOS orientation, students also engaged with the TAVP this past week by contributing to a class HistoryPin gallery featuring selected clips from TAVP oral history interviews. You can explore our gallery here.

Screenshot from class HistoryPin gallery of TAVP oral history interview clips.

*All student bloggers in the class, including those cited above, completed this Social Media Privacy Agreement at the beginning of the semester.*

“Listening for a Change”: Students Blog about Texas After Violence Project Oral Histories

This week in “English 10-714: Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition: A Multidisciplinary Approach,” several students posted on our class blog about the experience of listening to a Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) oral history interview. The TAVP collects oral history interviews from people across Texas who have been affected by the death penalty in our state. The audiovisual interviews are archived at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative. The motto of the TAVP–“Listening For A Change”–indicates the TAVP’s goal of influencing public discourse about capital punishment in Texas by providing a forum for individuals to share their stories.

Students selected one oral history to listen to this week, and completed this Close Listening Worksheet as they listened. Using the results of these worksheets to compose blog posts, students reflected on the interviews, raised important questions, and made insightful observations about how the interviews connect with course readings. Since the TAVP interviews represent a range of positions on the death penalty, one student remarked,

“Dismissing people based on their stance on capital punishment is not objective. Although anyone can agree or disagree with her it is important to listen to anyone and everyone’s story in a way that allows for judgement to take the backseat.”

Screenshot from TAVP interview with Iliana Lopez, archived at the HRDI

Another student, who listened to an interview with Iliana López (see screenshot above), noted that this interview reinforces the importance of oral history at large.

“I found Illiana’s lived experiences accurately mapped out why restorative justice can be a powerful alternative to the responses of traditional law enforcement and courts… Her experience demonstrates the need to listen and share oral narratives; the stories of people we may not otherwise listen to, or who we may only hear through the filter of a criminal justice system that is more set on dehumanizing punishment rather than restorative conversation.”

Yet another student concluded, “It is difficult to learn to bear witness to injustice without either finding justice in it or turning yourself off. But witnessing is without question important.”

This is a significant point to which I would like to return over the course of our class discussions this semester. Why is it important that we bear witness to injustice by engaging with oral histories? What do we do with our emotions when listening to troubling narratives? What are some productive ways in which we can process and respond to the stories of injustice we’re encountering?

*All student bloggers in the class, including those cited above, completed this Social Media Privacy Agreement at the beginning of the semester.*

New Year, New Opportunities to Teach with Archives!

I’m looking forward to an exciting semester working with Southwestern University undergrads on projects involving a host of digital archives initiatives: the Digital Public Library of America, the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, and the Rule of Law Oral History Project, to name just a few. The beginning of the semester is a good time to evaluate teaching resources that have worked well in the past and think about incorporating new ones. Inspired by my colleague and fellow Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoc Monica Mercado’s (@monicalmercado) Twitter appeal this morning on behalf of her independent study undergrads–“does anyone have an article they like on *doing* archival research?”–I’ve collected here my go-to resources for facilitating undergraduate engagement with archives. I developed these resources with the support of the Bridging Disciplines Programs at UT-Austin in 2013, when I was still a wee graduate student. I’m happy to report that I still find them useful for getting everyone (students and faculty) on the same page about what archives are and how undergrads can orient themselves to the archival research task.

Without further ado:

Archival Research Glossary and Exercise. This glossary pulls from the Society of American Archivists Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology. The accompanying exercise enables students to familiarize themselves with common concepts and terms they’ll encounter in physical and digital archives.

Archival Artifact Analysis Worksheet. This basic worksheet challenges students to make analytical observations about a selected archival object. It also asks students to think about next steps for researching context, thus initiating the process of identifying secondary sources to contextualize primary sources.

Undergraduate Archival Research Considerations. This hand-out offers strategies and considerations for undergraduates new to the archival research task.

Archives and Interdisciplinary Education. This hand-out for faculty offers strategies and considerations for involving students in archives-based coursework.

Amplify Archives Event Showcases Community-Archives-Based Teaching and Learning

Last Friday, the Texas After Violence Project hosted a panel discussion about how the TAVP oral history archive, made digitally available through UT-Austin’s Human Rights Documentation Initiative, features in undergraduate teaching and learning at UT. The event took place as part of Amplify Austin, an exciting annual fundraising event supporting non-profits across the city. Participants convened at the Benson Latin America Collection, which is the physical home of the HRDI.

Rebecca Lorins, Acting Director of the TAVP and organizer of the Amplify Archives event, kicked off the discussion by welcoming the audience and providing some background on the purpose and operations of the TAVP, which aims to collect and archive oral histories that reflect how the death penalty affects communities throughout Texas. Kathryn Darnall, Graduate Research Assistant, followed up Rebecca’s remarks with an explanation of the HRDI’s mission to digitally preserve the archives of social justice movements.

Kathryn Darnall, Graduate Research Assistant at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, addresses the Amplify Archives audience

Next, Naomi Paik, Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at UT, reflected on her experiences teaching “American Studies 370: Race, Memory, Violence” during Spring of 2012.

Dr. Paik reflects on her course “AMS 370: Race, Memory, and Violence”

Dr. Paik’s course description reads as follows: “This interdisciplinary course examines how processes of racial formation and histories of racial violence shape knowledge production about the past in both historical narratives and in collective and individual memory. We will consider how narratives of the past are produced—from the selection of facts, their assemblage into archives, and creation of historical stories from the archives, as well as in the living and recorded memories of witnesses to the past. ”

Dr. Paik described how the TAVP archives anchored a course unit on race and U.S. imprisonment regimes. In consultation with Rebecca Lorins, she selected several TAVP oral history interviews representing multiple divergent perspectives on and experiences with the death penalty. Working in small groups, students analyzed the archives in terms of how they interacted with prevailing histories and assumptions about capital punishment in the U.S. Dr. Paik emphasized how powerful it is for UT students to engage with archives that are so closely tied to Texas state and regional history.

Following Dr. Paik’s remarks, I said a few words about my role as an intermediary between UT and the TAVP as an Austin community organization.

Charlotte Nunes discusses her role facilitating the BDP-TAVP internship experience

I have a long-standing relationship with Rebecca Lorins and the TAVP since I worked as a Graduate Assistant for the Bridging Disciplines Program (BDP), an interdisciplinary certificate program at UT. Over the years, the TAVP has hosted several undergraduate interns from the BDP, and Rebecca was a fantastic resource and collaborator as I pursued a project to support BDP interns by creating workshops and other resources on effective internship practices and responsible community engagement. When I took on co-Chairing responsibilities for the Human Rights and Archives Working Group in Fall 2013, Rebecca and I agreed that the time was right to mobilize a project that would offer BDP interns meaningful skill-building opportunities while substantively advancing the digital archiving mission of the TAVP. We circulated this call for interns, and I personally recruited several BDP students I thought might appreciate the opportunity.

Our recruitment efforts yielded a team of five stellar interns, all of whom have demonstrated exemplary commitment to our semester-long digital archiving project. Rebecca does the vast majority of the supervising work; however, we agree that my role serving as an intermediary between the TAVP and the BDP, and offering supervisory support to Rebecca (for example, I respond to blog posts, edit interns’ written work, and facilitate reading discussions on archival theory and practice), is part of what makes this such a functional university-community engagement project. This intermediary-consultant model is very effective at facilitating undergraduate engagement with archival materials. Looking to the future, I think that creating these types of consultant positions for graduate students could offer great professionalization opportunities. (Hmm… possible category of grant funding??)

The panel concluded with inspiring contributions from the TAVP intern team.

TAVP interns share their experiences participating in the digital archiving process

Jordan Weber, Tu-Uyen Nguyen, Lillie Leone, Sharla Biefeld, and Jessica Rubio discussed how the internship is connecting with their undergraduate education. Tu-Uyen shared how transcribing and archiving an interview with Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi-American who survived a murder attempt, is enriching her Asian American Studies minor. Lillie discussed how the hands-on, skill-building aspect of the internship complements and enhances what she’s learning in UT classrooms. Several of the students talked about how the internship has illuminated the definition and potential of oral history as a category of knowledge production and transmission.

A big thank you to all the panel participants and audience members for a fascinating discussion!

Texas After Violence Project Interns Learn Digital Archiving Software

Today, the Texas After Violence Project intern team had the opportunity to participate in a GLIFOS workshop with T-Kay Sangwand, Human Rights Archivist, and Kathryn Darnall, Graduate Research Assistant, both of the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative.

From left to right: Tu-Uyen Nguyen, Charlotte Nunes, Jessica Rubio, T-Kay Sangwand, Sharla Biefeld, Jordan Weber, and Lillie Leone. Image credit: Kathryn Darnall

Since 2009, the Human Rights Documentation Initiative has partnered with the Texas After Violence Project to digitally archive the audiovisual oral history interviews collected by the TAVP. The interviews, which document how the death penalty has influenced Texas communities, are freely available as a resource for public dialogue and scholarly research. GLIFOS is the software used by the HRDI to sync interview transcripts with interview recordings. This makes the interviews more accessible as research tools; they are searchable by content, so researchers can quickly find the themes and topics that most interest them within the oral history interviews.

A TAVP oral history interview with Donna Hogan, digitally archived at the Human Rights Documentation Initiative; note the synced transcript next to the video of the interview.

Each student intern is responsible for bringing one entire TAVP interview to completion, from transcription to HRDI archive and TAVP narrator page. This way, Rebecca Lorins (TAVP Acting Director) and I hope that the students feel a stronger stake in the project, and we also like the idea that they’ll have a shareable “deliverable” to showcase on their resumes at the end of the semester. Now that the interns have made such impressive progress transcribing, formatting, drafting abstracts, and creating tables of contents for the series of TAVP interviews they’re working on, they’re ready to begin the digital archiving process. T-Kay assigned them usernames and passwords so that they can log in to the HRDI website and edit metadata in the TAVP portion of the site.

T-Kay and Kathryn offered a useful GLIFOS manual that has been in development since the beginning of the TAVP-HRDI collaboration in 2009. After orienting the group to GLIFOS Social Media (GSM), T-Kay and Kathryn invited the students to begin the process of archiving their respective interviews. Thus the “work” part of the workshop began!

Here’s a look behind the metadata scenes on the TAVP HRDI site:

The metadata page for a TAVP oral history interview with Ireland Beazley

Descriptive metadata fields include interview creators and contributors, languages, geographic foci, and intellectual property rights. Once the interns filled out the metadata fields, they began the time-intensive process of syncing transcripts with video. The interns did a great job engaging with the technical aspects of the workshop. A big thank-you to T-Kay and Kathryn for sharing their expertise and providing the TAVP intern team with such a useful, hands-on digital skill-building opportunity!

Striking Oral History “Gold” at the Texas After Violence Project

Today I met with four members of the TAVP digital archiving internship team for a transcription workshop and work session.

Making reference to the Baylor Institute for Oral History Style Guide, we discussed the challenges and responsibilities that come with transcribing spoken testimony. Lillie, who has done some important work formatting TAVP transcriptions, brought up the challenge of determining when to edit out false starts and hanging phrases. In accordance with the Style Guide, she doesn’t want to include every false start, but at the same time she doesn’t want to compromise the integrity of the narrator’s voice. We agreed that while transcribing and formatting interviews might initially seem like straightforward tasks, in practice they involve a lot of careful judgement calls.

Despite the challenges, we agreed that there are many benefits of adhering to a standardized formatting system. It gives the oral history archive a professional edge, which conveys respect for narrators’ contributions. Standardizing transcriptions also makes them more useful as research tools, since researchers know where to look for certain information and what to expect in terms of layout.

After the transcription workshop, the interns jumped in to the transcribing task!

Jordan: “This is gold!” From left: Jordan Weber, Sharla Biefeld, Lillie Leone, and Tu-Uyen Nguyen.

Jordan, Sharla, Lillie, and Tu-Uyen are pictured here showcasing the discs that hold the video-recorded interviews they’re transcribing. After I snapped this picture, they popped the discs into the laptops, put in their headphones, and commenced “listening for a change.”

Jordan is transcribing an interview with Keith Brooks, son of Charlie Brooks, Jr., who in 1982 was the first person in the U.S. to be executed by lethal injection. Jordan, like the Brooks family, is from the Fort Worth area. He shared his thoughts on the deep community value of Keith Brooks’ personal story.

“This is gold! I have a personal connection to this story because I grew up nearby where Keith Brooks grew up. He mentions my high school! He talks a lot about the social conditions that impacted his life and his father’s life and related to his execution. Listening to his story has allowed me to go back and analyze my own community. I think that’s really important in this project. We’re documenting really important and vital stories that can affect national debates about the death penalty, but they’re coming from our communities. Keith Brooks’ story is really, truly a Texas story, and I feel that as citizens of Texas we need to listen to these stories and evaluate our legal institutions by considering them from this personal level.”

TAVP Interns Successfully Oriented

Last Friday, I got together for an orientation session with Rebecca Lorins, Acting Director of the Texas After Violence Project, and six fantastic undergraduate interns recruited from UT-Austin’s Bridging Disciplines Programs. Although several of the students had already gotten started on transcription tasks, the two-hour orientation gave everyone a chance to meet each other and set goals for our semester-long project to process a series of TAVP interviews and archive them at the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative. Here’s our super team! From left to right: Blair Robbins, Jordan Weber, Charlotte Nunes, Jessica Rubio, Lillie Leone, Tu-Uyen Nguyen, and Sharla Biefeld.

Apologies for the none too high quality image, but thanks to Rebecca for thinking to snap a picture!

Rebecca took the lead during the orientation, offering students excellent background on the history and identity of the TAVP as well as the history of the death penalty in Texas. She also offered helpful remarks on oral history theory and practice. I facilitated discussion of two pertinent readings Rebecca selected for the occasion: “What’s Messing With Texas Death Sentences?” by David McCord and “What is a ‘Good’ Interview?” by Ronald Grele.

Image credit: Jessica Rubio

The interns asked great questions and engaged closely with the readings in discussion. Several of them made insightful points about how the readings related to their TAVP experience thus far. For example, Jordan and Sharla talked about how the overall decline in executions in Texas in recent years figures in some of the oral histories they are transcribing. Their comments led to a dynamic discussion about how individual’s personal stories relate to structural developments in law and policy.

Now that the students are off and running on auditing, transcription, and formatting processes, Jessica Rubio kindly gave me permission to share her reflections on the early days of her internship. Jessica’s eloquent reflections provide insights into the technical aspects of the auditing process as well as the profound emotional experiences that sometimes attend this process:

“The most relatable way to describe the first week of my TAVP internship is by calling it a whirlwind of emotions; I began the week flooded with excitement and anticipation of what was soon to come and ended the week bewildered by what I’d seen and heard. My first task was listening to and auditing the transcription of an interview with Derrek Brooks, a son of the first man killed by lethal injection in the United States. Throughout the interview I found myself constantly pausing the audio to fully absorb whatever I’d just heard. I came into the story a complete stranger and found that every new piece of information seemed to be more important or more crucial than the last.

Listening to Derrek’s story was like meeting a stranger at a party and playing audience to a first-hand account of their life from beginning to end; at the onset the only thing you know will happen is that there will be ups and downs in their story along the way. Even though I was expecting the ups and downs of Derrek’s story I found that each dip and rise of this rollercoaster was more profound than I had expected. I directly felt Derrek’s emotions throughout, from the obvious pain he feels due to an absent father to the eagerness in his voice to tell of what he feels to be an injustice and his goal to exonerate his father posthumously.

While auditing Derrek’s interview was certainly a monumental task to step off with, I’m certainly glad my introduction to this internship didn’t play out any other way. I really believe that delving in so deep so quickly instantly opened my eyes to what to expect out of this internship and also what all this process entails. I feel that every task from here on – large or small – I’ll be prepared for. I’m glad I had this base to jump from because I now fully see just how this work effects those both directly and indirectly involved.”

The Story of This Blog

I recently completed my PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, I teach World Literature classes at UT and co-Chair the Rapoport Center Human Rights and Archives Working Group. Over the course of writing my dissertation on fiction of the British Empire, I continually looked to archives for the incomparable sense of context they offer. Archival materials including the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, published out of London from 1840 to 1931, Leonard Woolf’s unpublished correspondence during the mid-nineteen-teens with E.W. Perera, Sri Lankan lawyer and activist, and various typed and handwritten drafts of Coolie (1936), published by Anglophone Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, all provided valuable insights into how novelists like E.M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, and Winifred Holtby oriented themselves to literary and political collaborators in areas of India, Sri Lanka, and South Africa.

The more I used archives as a student, the more interested I became in using archives as a teacher. During a Graduate Assistantship at the UT Bridging Disciplines Programs, I learned about the growing trend toward inquiry-based learning in higher education. Recognizing the utility of archival research tasks for facilitating undergraduate research skills such as thinking critically, identifying and summarizing main ideas, recognizing the contingency of knowledge, delineating fields of inquiry, and building research questions, I initiated a project to expand support for undergraduate archival research at UT’s many glorious archival institutions. I created a series of resources for both students and educators on archives and interdisciplinary education, and developed an interactive Archival Research Workshop, which I have presented to undergraduate classes in English, History, and Government.

This semester—spring 2014—will be a fun one in terms of archives and education. I’m integrating a substantial archive component in the two world literature surveys I teach. And as Archives and Education point-person for the Human Rights and Archives Working Group, I’m collaborating with Rebecca Lorins of the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) to offer a team of UT undergraduate interns a meaningful opportunity to learn about digital archives by building them. The students are processing interviews with people who have been affected by the death penalty in Texas, and archiving them at the UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI). Rebecca and I hope that the project will provide a rich internship experience for the students while substantively advancing the mission of the TAVP.

I established this blog to document and reflect upon these projects, as well as to chronicle events and opportunities of interest having to do with archives and education at UT and beyond. I hope you’ll visit often! I welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions for content.

archiveseducate

An educator's journey in archives and undergraduate teaching

UT Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative