Project:

Colored Conventions Project (https://coloredconventions.org/)

Project Directors & Members:

P.Gabrielle Foreman (https://www.pgabrielleforeman.com/), Penn State University

Jim Casey, (https://jim-casey.com/), Penn State Universiy

Other Project Members (https://coloredconventions.org/about/team/)

Keywords:

American History, Political Events(1830~1890s), Black Movement, Open Education, Record Archiving

Project Reviewer:

Michael C. Lee (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Project Overview

The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) rediscovers relatively underrepresented political events in American history.  The CCP shows the long journey of American Black communities fighting for educational, labor, and legal justice for seven decades (1830~1890s) through which the project revives the Black political movement and its political implications regarding civil and human rights.

CCP is a website that aims to document and bring the collective organizing efforts of 19th-century Black communities to digital life. The site has been created and operated by diverse researchers – scholars, graduate students, librarians, and undergraduates -, and functions as a research hub for “a new generation of researchers, students, and community scholars.” Plus, CCP provides the public with opportunities to engage with the invaluable resource for understanding the history of Black collective organizing. In this sense, the project is also a cultural hub for the public.

CCP was launched and cultivated at the University of Delaware from 2012 to 2020. The project has received funding from several grantors – Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Wallace Posner Family Foundation, Delaware Humanities Forum, and the University of Delaware grants. Also, the project maintains its fruitful contributions to scholarly publications, conference presentations, workshops, and community presentations. Moreover, by providing teaching materials and collecting records from the public, CCP has actively expanded its audience scope.

 Project Review

The CCP site features general information, digital exhibits of scholarship research using Colored Convention records, teaching materials for educators, and CCP newsletters. In addition, their Digital Records site (https://coloredconventions.org/about-records/) provides audiences with many primary sources from the convention movement, including minutes, articles, speeches, letters, pictures, and images.

The website is built on the WordPress platform and uses digital archives technologies to collect, organize, and store historical documents. On the <Exhibits> page, the archives include digitized documents, pictures, images, and graphs explaining the influence of various factors on the Colored Conventions movement. Each exhibit thoroughly explains the events, contexts, people, and its meaning to the whole movement. Also, each page links the related digital records and other relevant exhibit pages; thanks to this, the audience can easily navigate the site and follow their interests through the links.

CCP is a good example of a DH project, as it has certain features:

1. Epistemic Justice & Sovereignty:

The CCP clarifies the principles and goals of its work, that is, rediscovering and understanding devalued and underrepresented Black history and voices. The project highlights the diverse leaders and places involved in the convention movement. This includes well-known figures such as writers, church leaders, editors, and entrepreneurs, as well as those whose contributions to this collective action have been overlooked even by their American Black communities. Especially by affirming “Black women’s centrality to nineteenth-century Black organizing,” the project reshapes epistemic sovereignty: (a) what we need to know, (b) who must be included, and (c) how it should be done.

2. Open online access & Interplay:

All the materials, information, and digital records they use for the project are open to the audience on the website. Plus, CCP encourages users to actively interact with and participate in the project by accepting newly found records that have not yet been featured. (The website specifies the records needed: https://coloredconventions.org/about-conventions/submit-records/)  In addition, each section on the website is closely related, and users can find the contents they need easily as they navigate the site.

3. Pedagogical approaches:

The project offers teaching guides through which users can freely use and teach the materials in K-12/AP/College classes. Each chapter has a separate curriculum for K-12 and AP/College classes using diverse approaches to audiences – 1) Resources, Methods, Questions, and Standards for K-12, and 2) Questions, Class Activity, and Example for AP/College Classes. With this attempt to offer educational support, the CCP links its ongoing work to the present.

One of the great accomplishments of this project is the wealth of data collected through the project website and the possibility of active utilization in various ways, including academic research, educational resources, cultural-digital projects, and even social movements.

What I also noticed from CCP is its localness, narrowing down its research interests and subject. When embracing the localness of a certain community, there could be the danger of sacrificing its interconnectivity with others. However, through the open inquiry, research, and interaction structure, CCP allows users to engage with the project and other participants through the website and the curriculum. By bringing the hidden historical events to today and contributing to an increased understanding of Black communities’ political movements in American history, CCP speaks for everyone regarding ongoing issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, discriminatory policing, and structural racism in America’s political landscape.

Here is a PDF of the poem I referenced in class!

And here is a description of the text from Google books:

“In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. “

The Shakespeare and Company Project, platformed by Princeton University, analyzes the development of modernism. This digitized collection of records from the Shakespeare and Company lending library lets us examine how scholars in the Lost Generation read, interacted, and shaped their contemporary intellectual moment. Analyses of geospatial relations, gender identity, and popular books at the library inform the work on this site.

https://momentsofinnovation.mit.edu

Overview

This is a website that documents the intersections of representation and technology as An interactive installation and online research project. It chronicles innovative technologies or creative applications of technologies used in documentary work through the years. The project’s goal is to link the technological past to the present. It is a joint project from MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and IDFA DocLab.

Based on the credits page it was created by a mid-size team of under 20 folks. They worked with a France-based media studio that works with orgs and companies to develop websites, interfaces, and films. They did have outside funding from several foundations.

Works for me:

• that it scales well for multiple sizes across desktop and is optimized for mobile viewing
• the typeface and font are easily readable. san-serif typefaces for reading on the web is better
• landing page is visually interesting, not overwhelming. I like the use of mouse hover effects to give the website the feeling of movement. It’s clear what users can do on the site.
• Most links led somewhere.
• The design is simple, but solid (kind of standard internet site, but feels more modern that many DH projects I’ve seen)
• The innovations documented were fascinating and engaging. I watch documentaries and encounter documentation practices everyday but had not really taken a more conscious moment to think about the evolution of this practice over time. (one of those you know on a high level but don’t investigate more thoroughly often)
• I like that each section starts at the point furthest from the present. Each section is a visual timeline of documenting practices and you can slide show through each one without going back to the main page. This feature is only possible at the top of a given sections and I wonder why they chose not to include a button or arrow a prompt for the next section at the end of a section too since it is less intuitive to scroll back up to the top.
• The description for each project is not super text heavy and give you enough information to do your own deeper dive.
• The site also doesn’t have the text spanning the entire page, which will fatigue readers, so column sizes are good.
• This feature is only possible at the top of a given sections and I think I may have tried to see if a prompt for the next section could be added to the end of a section since it is less intuitive to scroll back up to the top.

Some Issues:

• There’s a favoring of projects from MIT of IDFA works, or other orgs in these networks which makes sense as they could more easily get information about these works. But regardless there seems to be an overrepresentation or bias in that way
• There’s a gap in years represented. This could give the wrong impression to a user that innovation isn’t happening during these times.
• Overall the content is Western centric and also the projects included are overwhelming male led projects
• I don’t know as much about web accessibility features, but there don’t seem to be any options as far as I could tell.
• A huge issue is that this type of project includes links to other projects. While not every innovation links to a project somewhere else on the web, many of them do. As long as the moments in innovation team is updating and maintaining the site it’s fine, but they can’t account for how well or not other sites they have linked to keep up their web presence. A few links I clinked into had expired domains, domains taken over by AI sites, outdated flash reliance, broken video links etc.
• They do make clear they are not exhaustive list and I’m not sure if it’s still being updated, but most documentation stops around 2015/6

Overall I do find this to be a successful DH project, but bias and typical web age issue are issues here.

Linked Jazz — a network visualization of jazz defined by the relationships between musicians. Here is the project documentation.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/22/dining/restaurant-menu-trends.html