 All righty, we're ready to start. I apologize for that brief delay. Welcome everybody to the spring 2023 CNI member meeting. I'm delighted you're here with us in Denver. Thank you all so much for joining us. Before we get into the opening plenary, I just have a few logistical announcements and related matters. I am Cliff Lynch, I am the director of CNI. For those of you, I've not had the pleasure of meeting in person yet, although I am thrilled to see so many familiar faces here. I would note we had a session for first time attendees. It was once again quite well attended. We probably have at least 40 or so first time attendees here and I'd urge you to those of you who are CNI attendees of long standing to make them welcome. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to our fellows from the Association of Research Libraries, LCDB program and of course to our clear fellows and we have some clear fellows here with us that I'll be introducing in just a few minutes. We also I believe have some additional clear fellows with us in the audience and I'm delighted about that too. I'd like to welcome our international member reps, our speakers and guests from abroad. We're very happy to have you here and I hope that international travel is continuing to become a decreasing burden as things go on. A word on COVID sorts of things. We've done our best to spread out the rooms a little more as we have in all of our meetings since we began meeting in person again and I hope that you find that comfortable. We don't have a masking requirement but masks are very welcome and I see a number of you are wearing them. I would just all I'll say about this is understand that people are in really different places about this and I think we just all need to respect that and be respectful of it. We have a great program coming up and today we'll conclude with another session of lightning rounds that we initiated with our December 22 meeting. After the lightning rounds we'll go right into a reception and I hope you'll join us this afternoon for that reception. We are starting an experiment tomorrow morning at breakfast where we will have some tables designated as discussion tables. That will be very informal. There will be no report on those discussions but it's just an opportunity to share experiences, ideas and questions with people thinking about the same sorts of things and you have a list in the program book of the sessions. Those will include a session on chat GPT and related generative AI and libraries, a session on machine learning and AI and publishing. Senior scholar Don Waters will talk about his project on information infrastructure for grant challenges and we will have an update on open source and open science and I think those are all of them unless I've forgotten one but they're all in the program. We'll conclude tomorrow with a set of a panel moderated by James Shulman which will bring together some of the commissioners from the ACLS commission on sustainable humanities scholarship and social justice and I think that's gonna be a really interesting session because while that commission has been working hard for a couple of years and you heard a little bit early in the pandemic about what they hope to accomplish, they're coming to the end of their term and we will I think hear at least some of the high level observations that they're making. I wanna note that there are several other commissioners here who will not be part of that panel but are certainly an integral part of the CNI community and I also urge you to chat with them about the work of the commission. We have a few minor schedule changes. Tomorrow morning, the 1055 sessions, two of them have switched rooms. The extended reality session and the coordinating campus data services have exchanged venues between the windows and the grand ballroom. You can find information about that and any other changes at the bulletin board near registration. Last logistical thing I wanna note is that the final session before the closing plenary is kind of weird. We've got two 60 minute sessions and a 30 minute session. All of those three sessions are really interesting. If you go to the 30 minute session, please feel free to either just hang out for a bit before the plenary starts or to join one of the 60 minute sessions in progress. We do need to wrap up one of those sessions in 30 minutes so that we can turn the grand ballroom for the closing plenary. I think that's all I've got in terms of logistics. Well, I'm welcoming folks. I also wanna welcome three newer rejoining members. One is SAGE, once upon a time known as SAGE Publishing, but no more, as I understand it. Technology from SAGE, they are rejoining. AM, a SAGE subsidiary, is also joining. And I also wanna welcome Amazon Web Services as a new member represented here for the first time. They're doing lots of interesting things with many of our members. So with that, let me turn to the matter at hand. And this is just one of these plenary sessions that it gives me enormous pleasure to introduce and sort of very lightly moderate. So in the pre-pandemic times, there was this wonderful, wonderful program that CNI supported and kind of partnered with called the Clear Fellows. And these were scholars that Clear selected that were working on really innovative projects, often but not always related to digital humanities, but always scholarship with an important digital dimension and one that built on various kinds of content resources that our libraries were involved in. They used to join us at our meetings pre-pandemic, entire cadres of them. And you could always tell them because they were the ones asking the really interesting questions in the sessions during the Q and A. They were really valued as members of our community. And in fact, many of them after their terms as Clear Fellows found permanent homes at CNI member institutions. Then there was the pandemic and as so many other things, everything changed. We were really concerned about the ability of the Clear Fellows to not to do their work. They did their work through the pandemic. They did it marvelously and did tremendous things, but their ability to connect with the broader community when everybody became so disconnected and moved into virtual land. We tried to highlight some of that work in our virtual meetings during the pandemic, but now we're back in person. And I thought it would really be appropriate to highlight at least a few of the Clear Fellows from the two most recent cohorts and look at their wonderful scholarship. I think that as you hear about the projects that they're doing, the work that they're doing, you will begin to get a vital perspective on where the future of scholarly work is going. Not the only perspective, but a really important one that you might not get in other ways. I'm going to ask each of the Clear Fellows who are with us and we're just gonna go in order to introduce themselves briefly. Talk a little bit about their work, their experiences as a fellow, and particularly a little bit about going through the pandemic and then returning, coming out of the pandemic. A bit about their aspirations and their challenges as scholars going in, taking a really unusual and innovative path for their scholarship and their careers. I'm gonna ask each of them to go about 10 or 12 minutes and we're gonna be switching off some laptops and hopefully that's all gonna go smoothly and if not, we're gonna wing it and do the best we can and it's all gonna be fine. After that, I have a couple of questions. We'll open it up to the audience for a few questions. So I'll shut up. You don't wanna hear from me. You wanna hear from our Clear Fellows and I'll invite Dr. Portia Hopkins. Thank you for being here to begin the set of talks. Now how do I get my screen up there? I think they can switch it up. Okay. Will you switch it for me? Oh, there we go. Okay, perfect. Hi everyone, my name is Dr. Portia Hopkins. I am a Clear DLF Fellow at Rice University. It's a joint appointment between the Center for Engaged Research and Learning and the Fondren Library. It is my honor to be here today so I wanna thank C&I, Clear DLF and Rice University for this opportunity. My presentation is entitled Exploring Houston's Black Experiences. When I first started this fellowship, I was so excited to be able to dig deeper into my city but it was in the middle of the pandemic. So it made it very difficult for me as a scholar who engages with communities through oral history and communal archiving to engage with them in the way that I normally would sans pandemic. However, as scholars, we are gracious in our opportunity and we're also innovative in our practice. And so during my time at Rice, I was able to participate in a number of projects. I just wanna highlight a few. And the remainder of the time I will use to talk about the most recent project, the Black Houston Symposium. When I came to Rice, I started working with Project Pleasantville, a project that looked at the environmental and economic history of an African-American community that was founded in 1948. It was completely self-contained until the end of segregation. And my role as an oral historian was to collect some of the social and cultural histories that sometimes get lost in the shuffle when we're doing environmental narratives. I also was very fortunate to become active in the Convict Leason Labor Project serving as their vice president for two years. This has been a wonderful opportunity to work directly with community members who live in Fort Bend County and who were affected by the Sugar Land 95. In 2018, there were 95 bodies found at a Fort Bend ISD school site. It made national news, you might've heard about this. And so through that project, I was able to work as the vice president with the Convict Leason Labor Project. I also started working on historical marker applications for the first interracial rodeo in Houston and helped two black businesses in Brasauria County obtain a historical marker at the county level. I've been doing community programming and workshops, oral history workshops with community members as well as a community member who I've partnered with most recently named Andy Moran, who he has created an Andy's Take series. He is a very creative, interesting man. He's an art collector and he has very interesting friends in their 80s and 90s. And so the project really is to collect some of these oral histories from these elders in the black community. And so as I was working on these projects, I started to think about the different ways in which these narratives could come together in a culminated space that we could talk about the research between community members, scholars and hopefully also affect policy. And so this is where the black Houston symposium arose. Our vision and our mission to facilitate spaces for open dialogue between and across communities in order to explore the experiences of black people in Houston and to engage with scholars through collaborative research projects. And we were very successful in this for our inaugural year. Our mission to create spaces to use collaborative research and move towards a deeper understanding of the ways in which Houston's shifting landscapes affect black communities and inform policy. So I just have to note that this started as a post-it. I was in, it did, it started as a post-it. I am proud to say that I was in a meeting at the Fondren Library with other digital humanities scholars. And it was a brown bag luncheon, one of these very casual things that we get to know each other at the beginning of the semester. So we got together and everyone was talking about how excited they were about their future projects, all of the amazing things that we're doing at Rice University from the Racial Geography Project, the task force that was created in 2019, as well as other projects, the slave voyages project that's also hosted currently at Rice. So we had maybe 30 or 40 people together in this room talking about the different things that they were doing and the different communities they were engaging with. But I wanted to take it a step further. How can we get communities and scholars together in a space where they can collectively have these conversations? And so it started as a post-it. It finished with a question. Will you join me in this effort? And so seven brave individuals were tasked with helping bring this symposium to life. Known to locals as H-Town and the prophetic city, Houston is the most ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the United States and the fourth largest city in the nation. For our purposes, the African diaspora briefly defied consists of peoples of African origins living outside the continent, irrespective of their citizenship and nationality. This symposium will provide a platform for community members and scholars to come together in order to unpack the ways in which the political, economic, and social landscapes of Houston impact the diversity of experiences for black people in the city. But how do we contribute to this phenomenal city and to the nation and to the world? Join us for the Black Houston Symposium! We're so excited about this video. And let me tell you, it's not easy to make a video. I don't know if anyone's ever done this, but it's very difficult. And I have to say thank you to DES for putting this together with B-roll footage from Rice University and KHOU News. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the lessons learned with my time left. As many of you are in these spaces, you recognize the hard work it takes to put an idea on paper, but then also to birth that idea into the world. And so I have a couple of lessons that I did learn. This was the inaugural Black Houston Symposium. We were so proud of our efforts, exceeds expectations, but as scholars, we also have to be critical and think about the ways that we can improve. And so the first piece of advice I would say is to build a solid team. A strong team will create the foundation for future programming and a longstanding brand. This was incredibly important. No one from our planning committee left. They actually all stayed till the end. How often does that happen? So we were very fortunate in that regard. We wanted to foster community networks. We wanted to promote through social media, but we also recognized that word of mouth is one of the strongest tools that we can use to reach the community. And so we built strong partnerships across communities by being present in those spaces. We use technology. As a digital humanity scholar, this was something that came easier to me than other projects, but I recognize that you could also use technology to collect data and streamline workflows to improve for future planning. We're doing an archives launch with this Black Houston Symposium. We're able to connect communities across archives and establish joint collections. One will be housed at the Woodson Research Center at Rice University, and the other will be housed at the African American Research and History Center, the Gregory Campus with the Houston Public Library. I was very interested in reflecting, critiquing, and improving. I came from community colleges. I taught for 10 years in the community college space, and we were very much about assessment, so I did learn how to assess and how to use data-driven research to improve for the future. And also, roll with the punches. Let me just tell you, the morning of this symposium, my son got galaxy slime in his hair. Do you know what galaxy slime is? It's slime that sticks to your hair. Once it dries, that was two hours, T minus two hours before the symposium started. I also burned the back of my jacket while trying to iron it, so definitely roll with the punches. We had to adjust schedules. People got sick, so we had to adjust where necessary, keep things light. I don't have all of the data yet, because we actually just did this March 23rd and 24th, but of the data we did collect, we had 152 registrants, of which 67% attended both days. And for an inaugural activity symposium, we thought that was phenomenal results. We did recognize, however, that with this symposium, we had a significant number of onsite registrants and in order for us to continue to bring community members to the community, from the community to Rice University, we understood that we had to make sure that this was a free symposium, absolutely free. So we provided parking validations for folks that were not able to pay for their parking on campus, but we want to go further next year and possibly provide transportation for those that were not able to come to the symposium because of transportation difficulties. Just a couple of images from the symposium. We had a high school smart city DEI hackathon award ceremony, so that was really great. These high school students are phenomenal, like have faith in this next generation. We had a so just convict leasing round table where we talked about how the community was engaging with the school board to create a curriculum. We looked at activism across Black Houston's. Our first panel of Thursday evening was the Black Houston's and Rice Two Histories in which, I don't know if you can see her in the middle, Miss Belma McAfee Williams who earned a PhD from Rice in the 60s, but that degree was not conferred upon her until 2016. She got a standing ovation at our symposium. We had an excellent second day at Rice University using the round table and panel map models. We did rethinking Black Houston's and Houston's Highway and Black Neighborhoods Panel that was done by Rice University students. We also had community scholars at the ancestors in memory where we had a live libation ceremony and then also the HBCU legacy art archives and digital humanities. This was a panel that was put together by the Texas Southern University Art Museum. Oh, I skipped one. I didn't. Find me online. I wanted to do a special thanks to my husband and my kids, Amanda Fokie and the archivist at the Woodson Research Center, Maya Rain with Circle, all real radio who did a lot of our promotional materials, the digital media commons at Rice, Moni Maker who made all of our t-shirts for our volunteers and Stan at FedEx. So a really exciting opportunity. I want to thank you again. And I just have one question. Will you join me in this picture? Because being a plenary speaker was actually on my bucket list. So thank you very much. And now let me invite Taiwo Lasusi from Carnegie Mellon, one of the newest cohort of clear fellows to join us. And hopefully we can make some AV and head your cabin. Hello, everyone. I'm glad this worked out well because I'm always one of the persons that get this messed up whenever I have a presentation. So my name is Taiwo Lasusi and I'm a Claire Postdoctoral Fellowing Community Data Literacy. And I would like to thank CNI, Claire, DLF and everyone for this unique opportunity to share with you my career goals and experiences as a fellow at CMU and what that implies in relation to my current work, partners, projects from an interdisciplinary lens. So I currently work at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries where I develop pedagogy and teach workshops on data management and analysis. And our goal is to give students the fundamental skills they need and apply the skills to teach in the libraries. And what we do is that we do not only want them to have these skills for educational purposes, but to help them solve social problems that arises in the course of the activities. And so that helps them really put their education in context. So one of the workshops that I teach include coding and qualitative data. And anytime I mention to people and I say, oh, I teach coding and qualitative data, some are like, what was that? They don't know that coding exists in the context of qualitative research and qualitative data. So that's one of the things that I'm also trying to push forward and discuss and help people realize that they can have substantial knowledge when it comes to coding, interviews, texts, videos, and things like that as related to qualitative data. So I'm going to speak more on teaching qualitative coding a little bit in the next slide. But I also want to mention that some of the other things that we do in the libraries in which I am part of is facilitating and publicizing interdisciplinary and interdepartmental events that promote community interests. We recently just concluded the citizen science and community data events which was moderated by the CMU Dean of Libraries, Kate Webster, was excited to see Kate here today. And also led by my current supervisor Emma Slating and publicized by different individuals and groups including myself. The event is focused on inspiring engagement between CMU and local communities. The other thing I also do is to help students understand data management plan in the context of their own research because every data management plan can be unique depending on the kind of research at hand. So touching a little bit more on qualitative coding, I teach CMU students in Pittsburgh as well as CMU Qatar students how to code, text, how to transcribe, audios and videos and just how to know how to use qualitative software packages like MVVO and Mascudia. I also teach how to use these software packages to analyze and interpret their data and like I said, answer their unique research questions. I answer questions related to validity and reliability of qualitative data and analysis through interrater reliability check discussions. So talking about my partners, I work with the Director of the Sustainability Initiative at CMU, Alex Inika, and serve on the Initiatives Advisory Board. And what we do combines educating students and faculty and exploring the university's connectedness to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, through teaching and research, community engagement and the likes. A great thing is that in 2020, CMU became the first university to perform a voluntary university review and I feel very lucky to be part of the team that facilitated the 2020 voluntary university review process. I also work with the Center for Shared Prosperity at CMU and my role is to collaborate with community partners and on social and environmental justice issues. We also give free workshops to our community partners and these workshops are actually open to anyone interested within and outside CMU. I am currently moving forward conversations with Chelsea Cohen, an executive fellow at the office of the president and Jessica Benner, a Lycian at the university libraries. And what we're really trying to do is, we're trying to identify processes and practices to celebrate and better coordinate the many community-based research and engagement activities that is happening around campus. And by the way, that is, you know, me and some students in that this wonderful picture just trying to talk more about how their project is relevant to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and now they can actually, you know, affect the communities they have through their own research. So I'm speaking on my own personal research. My research project is called the DAPGEP project which focuses on the problematics of greenhouse emissions and flooding, particularly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am currently working on the chronology and historical trends of flooding in Pittsburgh, especially in places like Shadyside and Houseside, the community of Pittsburgh, especially in places like Mayville. And so what we are doing right now is I'm currently collaborating with other library partners and we are working with coastal professionals and community-based organization to begin important conversations that speak to the effect of flooding in affected localities in Pittsburgh and other neighboring communities, which, you know, has kick-started my data collection process. And some of the research question that I'm working on on this subset of my research, which focuses on the issue of flooding in Pittsburgh, is I'm trying to explore how the trajectory of flooding in Pittsburgh has changed over time, especially from the modern era to current times. I'm also examining the effects of flooding in Pittsburgh's floodplain communities and how the problem of flooding can be ameliorated in such communities. And lastly, on the issue of flooding, I'm looking at the roles of community-based organization and environmental organization in addressing the problem of flooding in floodplain areas in Pittsburgh communities. It is important to mention that it can be sometimes demanding, imagine how this, you know, work together in working with the libraries, working with the Center for Shared Prosperity and the Sustainability Initiatives at CMU all at once. It can be, you know, quiet. Sometimes I'm like, oh, so what am I getting? So it can be quite demanding to merge this. But one thing that has worked for me and has helped me balance this is that the needs of the students are also usually the needs of the community members. So for example, I teach qualitative coding and I realize that many students are interested and many community members, like nonprofit organizations, are also interested and have attended these workshops subsequently, I mean, from the past and we're planning to do more for subsequent events. And so this is important because I have been able to meet the overlapping demand of both students and community members to break that gap. I would also like to mention that although we recognize that CMU is an interesting context because we are very siloed. For instance, our computer science department does not very often, you know, talk to or relate to our College of Humanities and the libraries can be sometimes left out as well. So as we have to overcome barriers to connect more with our communities, we also need to overcome barriers to connect with students across departments. And I'll be really interested, you know, to connect and learn from individuals and community partners and institutions represented here on how to move forward as we look towards a brighter future. Thank you. And I think I'm going to be like Patricia and take a picture because this is one of my bucket list as well. So if you don't mind, thank you so much. Well, project, thank you. I'm now going to invite Heidi Nichols from Johns Hopkins to join us at the podium. Thank you, Cliff Lynch for inviting us and for organizing and for all your help so far, getting ready for the conference and thank you to Clear as well and my fellow panelists. I love hearing about all your work so much. I'm Dr. Heidi Nichols. I'm a postdoctoral fellow, a clear postdoctoral fellow and a Black Beyond Data postdoctoral fellow which is a Mellon funded initiative that is across a few institutions, but it's also at Johns Hopkins University. And so I'm presenting part of the tiny part of Black Beyond Data that I work on that is around health and medicine and racism and the project is titled Otherwise Bodies. I started as a postdoc in this year, 2022 in fall and so this project is a little bit more in its infancy than my fellow scholars but I'm really excited to share it with you. So like I said, Black Beyond Data is a Mellon funded lab that brings together the digital Black communities, computational communities and community engagement and in general it's about data for Black life, for Black freedom and also Black study more broadly. The three co-PIs who are also my mentors, you can see here this is doctors Kim Gallin, Sasha White and Jessica Marie Johnson and it's really organized around these three pillars. Again, like I said, Black community data, health data which is the section I work on the most and then slavery and data which is Dr. Sasha White and Dr. Marie Johnson's specialties. So I'm not gonna go through this, you might not be able to read it all but just to show you how much Black Beyond Data is involved in, the little red circle is my section, I'm happy to answer any questions about all the work that's being done if you have questions later in the Q&A or later in the conference. So the racism and medicine component, we're both sociologists and also kind of historically minded sociologists of health and empire and so together we're thinking about the ongoing realities of racism in medicine but more from that historical lens and also a place-based lens. So I've launched Otherwise Bodies, you're free to go to the website now, it's in its infancy but it's an interactive and public digital humanities project that explores health and medicine amidst empire, particularly centering the history of Hopkins itself as a leader in US medicine but also as an institution that has been mired in kind of colonial processes since 1887 when it was founded. And by empire, I mean the United States as an empire from 1776 to the present. So thinking about empire in the sense of the lands on the continent, unincorporated and incorporated territories and also lands occupied by US governing institutions and militaries. So I come to this work just a little bit about my own positionality. I grew up in Hawaii, I'm a white settler colonist from Hawaii, from Oahu which you see here and so this comes from theories of settler colonialism that is out of indigenous feminisms like Kaunani K. Trask, can you see this quote? And so I think foregrounding the imperial structure of the United States leads to better analysis of social problems like health inequalities and so Black Beyond Data is trying to integrate an understanding of anti-blackness in health and medicine with anti-indigeneity and settler colonialism. And so this project has three parts. Part one is seeing empire and so this will be a public facing digital history of Hopkins and other health institutions in Baltimore, including interactive maps that kind of connect both the local histories of displacement in East Baltimore around the medical campuses with kind of the global health research that Hopkins has done that has been both beneficial but also again mired in these colonial practices. And so as I'm doing archival work at the Chesney Medical Archives in Hopkins, I'm also helping the archivist there edit the metadata and the collection descriptions to note kind of the ways in which these histories of racial formation and colonialism are part of the institutional archives as well. And so then we're also focusing on how the settlement of Baltimore itself including Hopkins transform native spaces such as the Piscataway and the Hopkins-Hoskohonic lands that Hopkins occupies again with these larger imperial interactions. So here's just one example from the archives in 1887, the hospital at Hopkins is founded and in the institutional archives you can see all these ways that early physicians that kind of became the leaders of U.S. medicine were traveling around with U.S. occupations such as in the Philippines. And then a more local example, this is a framework of thinking about how the spatial changes around East Baltimore mirror settler colonial processes. So the ways that black Baltimoreans as they get dispossessed from the neighborhoods that they lived in for sometimes generations, it really mirrors the way that settler colonialism dispossesses indigenous peoples. And of course also there are black Baltimoreans who are also native. So this is an image created by one of the community organizations we're partnering with where you can see they are reframing this thing called East Baltimore Development Initiative to everybody is displaced intentionally. The second part is the racialized bodies. And this is more narrowly focused on medical professionals and the uses of race and clinical settings. So we're going to be partnering with physicians and medical students to create a summer institute on structural competencies in medical education. So again, I'm a sociologist, structural competency being these broader historical macro ways of thinking about how race impacts the human body. And we've actually applied for a couple of large grants to fund this. I'm very excited about that. And the overall objective is to equip health professionals but also bring them together to do a symposium of capstone research and pedagogical initiatives that will also be on the otherwise body site so that it can travel beyond Hopkins to other health institutions and be a resource. I think also maybe for people who are not as connected to large health institutions. So then finally, this is the most community oriented part of the project. The part that I'm also most excited about is called Unruly Futures. And it's going to invite contributions from community members in East Baltimore itself, both artists, people who are affiliated with Hopkins or not, people doing kind of social medicine and mutual aid, also the medical students who live around East Baltimore who are beginning their medical education. A number of different actors and the hope is to have an online zine and repository that remembers and envisions how people have cared for themselves amidst empire both historically but also as people have tried to stay healthy such as during the pandemic or at other times when health institutions have still been exclusionary or violent towards them. And so again, it'll include things like social medicine, mutual aid, traditional or decolonial health practices. And I'm still learning a lot of the DH tools that I can use for this. So I'm gonna be learning from my fellow panelists here and from others. So yeah, I'm excited that I'm learning these tools. Okay, and this is inspired by, I don't know if any of you have read Linda Tuheva Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, which is mostly about social scientific research, but I think it has a lot to say for libraries and for DH in general, she says that we can really bind people together by asking people to do these kind of imaginative future oriented projects that have the capacity to bring people together politically for things that we want to change. These are the community partnerships that we're building over time. St. Francis Neighborhood Center in East Baltimore is actually a co-PI on Black Beyond Data. So they're a really solidified community member, one of the oldest neighborhood centers in Baltimore. Hoping to do stuff with them around these histories of race and empire with also young people who they serve. And then Brace, I mentioned before, is the Baltimore Redevelopment Action Coalition for Empowerment, and they're mostly an organization in response to, again, Hopkins as an institution, dispossessing Black Baltimoreans and also contributing to gentrification in Baltimore in general. So then wrapping up my overall goals as a sociologist, as an educator, as someone gaining skills in the digital humanities and health humanities. I really want to build these kind of interactive digital tools that help people see, literally see through the digital and through these kind of mappings and maybe even some augmented reality stuff. See empire, see this historical and structural foundation of racism, because that's something I think you can't disentangle. And then also doing more collaborative projects that think otherwise, that think about the future, the kinds of futures we might have, the ways that people might stay healthy and take care of one another, both with these health institutions but also apart from them if needed. And so, with that, I want to leave you with these images of a Baltimore AI reimagined with maybe healthier ways to feed ourselves, healthier cities, decolonized cities even in the future that could exist. And I thank you for listening. Feel free to give me feedback at any point during the conference and feel free to reach out to me. Thank you. And now I would like to invite Sinatra Smith to join us. She is working with the Philadelphia Art Museum and with Temple. Right. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to share with you what I've been doing in my fellowship so far. When I got the original invitation to participate in this panel, I was reminded that we did this in 2021. And I thought, oh my God, I have no idea what I said before. Whoever that girl is, I don't know her because I've done a lot of different things since then. I am the Clear Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Temple University Libraries. And I've had an excellent time in this fellowship despite starting during the pandemic. And I was able to find some ways to kind of take advantage of the time that I had on my hands while I was learning my institutions virtually, working remote for one institution the entire first year, the other institution 18 months and then eventually working in person starting, I believe February of last year. And I've been in this fellowship since July of 2020. So very strange beginning. But since I had that extra time to kind of do some things that would contribute to my own professional development, I started with getting the Society of American Archivists Digital Archive Specialist Certification online. And I was able to do the entire process online because one of the courses is supposed to be at like a in-person conference. That wasn't an option. So I was able to complete that during the first year, year and a half of the fellowship. I also participated in the inaugural cohort of the Association for African-American Museums and Howard University School of Business Advanced Executive Leadership Certification. And this past summer at the AAAM conference, I was awarded the PACE Center Award, which is for folks who are within the first 10 years of your museum career who are just changing the game and raising the standards for things that are possible in the field. I've also had a really fantastic opportunity to participate in some collaborative projects. And I want to highlight a few of those here. One is the Creating Access to HBCU Library Collections Project, which Portia actually found and invited me to work with her as a co-PI. And it was a partnership between CLEAR and the HBCU Library Alliance where we were interviewing folks that work at five specific institutions about challenges for gaining access to their special collections and archival records. Another project is 500 Years of African-American History in South Florida. Another one that Portia brought to me. Portia has been really helping my CV. And it's through the National Park Service and the Anasala, the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. And we were able to apply for a micro grant through CLEAR to bring on Dr. Luling Huang, who's a fellow at Carnegie Mellon, who's also here, hi, Luling. And he's kind of like our data person for the micro grant side of the project. And so we're documenting black history in South Florida. So from like Palm Beach all the way down to the Florida Keys, we've done three research trips. This was from our most recent one outside of the Cape Florida Lighthouse. And so we've had a really good time getting to know each other through that project. And then the last is the Curated Futures Project, which was a clear digital publication. I was one of the editors on that project. And we're also publishing an addendum this spring that's connected to a symposium I did last year that I'll talk more about in the next slide. Or yeah, in the next slide. So I come to this work as a former museum practitioner or professional. I was working at a small black institution in Prince George's County, Maryland, which we call gorgeous Prince George's. It was, but has now been replaced. But at the time it was the largest jurisdiction of affluent black folks in the country. Now to be surpassed by Charles County, which is right next door. So still our neighbors, which is a good time. So when I first got into the position, I was working on a WikiData project to enhance the digital visibility of black artists in the Philadelphia Museum of Arts Collection. So in order to make an edit to WikiData, which is what feeds into the Google Knowledge Graph. So when you're doing a search, this is how folks are able to come up. You have to have a reference URL in order, or you should, it'll flag you if you don't use one. It'll still allow you to input the information, but you all are probably familiar with WikiData. So we started with doing a blog aspect of the project so that those URLs could exist. So I was doing biographical research on our black artists, and then publishing a blog on our library and archives website, on our LibGuides website, so that that URL that had the full bibliography attached to it could be used as the reference URL as I was making WikiData edits. And I was just counting this morning, I published 102 blogs, each on a different artist, and I think I made edits on actually 100 artists, not 102, there were two that were just very well documented and I didn't need to add anything to their records. I also created a Zotero list that tracks all of the research that I've done. It includes links to the artwork and archival records and library special collections that are in our museum's collection. And you can find more information about how to design such a project at the link at the bottom of the left side of the screen, bit.ly slash WikiData blogs. It turned into a larger project where we did a WikiData edit-a-thon with both of the institutions that I worked for during the pandemic since it was a virtual world and it kind of worked really well. We also brought on some fellows through the leading fellowship that's hosted through Drexel University and I did some training with them. So the blogs that are listed on that link are the blogs that we all wrote as a part of the project. The next thing I was able to do was to do a Black Digital Humanities Symposium at Temple University. So last year the theme was Afrofuturism and we had a new, I think he's a grad director of the Africology and Africana Studies, African American Studies Department. Dr. Renato Anderson was our keynote speaker which was fantastic and we had some scholars come in and there was a book that was published at the Blockson Collection which I also work at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University. Everything has such a long title. So they published the Black Lives Always Mattered graphic novel, so you'll see in this picture Eric Battle who has on the blue shirt was the illustrator for that book. So we were able to do some really good things with folks who were working with the institution and folks who were coming from outside of the institution for that symposium and then we also did a professional pathways and Black D.H. workshop for folks who are either just getting started or kind of interested in Black D.H. And so we had a panel of folks come and do like smaller breakout room chats with the attendees and the other folks in my cohort really helped out with that and moderated some of the rooms, Portia, Petrusca, Francina who I don't think is here helped with that program, so that was fantastic. And so this year we're doing it again. Our theme this year is Black Virtual Futures and it's about the metaverse. And so we've got VR and Black creatives who use XR tools, Petrusca will be speaking of that as well. I always like to shout you guys out. And then the day before that is when we're doing our workshop. So it's in person, the symposium, if you're in the Philadelphia region and you'd like to come, there's a link so that you can register. It's all day, it's free, we're providing food. These workshop that's the day before is remote but that one is completely booked so I didn't add that link here. And then the last thing which is the most important part of what I've been doing as a part of my fellowship at least in my opinion is that I've been working with a lot of XR tools. Because of the department that I work in at Temple we're like the gaming department. Our department head makes board games and has a huge library of board games in his home. We've got someone in the department that makes VR games as like his hobby. So we do a lot with gaming tools in addition to traditional DH tools. So I have been able to develop some different projects as a result of that. So the first one is a story map that's highlighting it's going to kind of load very slowly. That's highlighting the origins of African sculptures in PMAs, European Painting and Sculptures department because those items exist there based on the provenance but they obviously don't show where the items come from on the continent. So I worked with a previous fellow Dr. Hillary with them Sanchez who helped me kind of understand what's in the collection. She was doing research on the objects to update their web labels on our collection site. And I was able to speak with the curator that works with those objects to select those that would be suitable for photogrammetry and weren't too fragile to be moved around because they needed to be on the turntable and rotate as I was taking the photos. So we developed this story map based on the research that she had done identifying where the objects are from and if it will allow me to actually show the map. Yes, it loaded, fantastic, it's coming, there you go. So we're able to see what parts of the continent our objects come from and she's got more information about each of them which I was able to add to this story map. So as it goes through, it shows you an image of the object which is cut off because of the format of the screen but if you look at it on a website you'll be able to see the full image. And the item name and its accession numbers to find it on our collections website a lot easier. The web label that was updated with a research attribution because her fellowship ended and she took the project with her to her student suit that she was working with at Villanova University to continue to do that research. So I've got a research attribution for each of these so we know who worked on which label and then there's a button to see the 3D model for those that have one and at the bottom it's gonna take forever to scroll through that. Let's do it this way. At the bottom there's the full collection of objects from this project which of course again on the website you can see the full collection a lot easier and then a photo, a TikTok of me doing photogrammetry which I'll show you at the end. The next project was to bring in an XR tool so I used those models from the previous project in this one with some additional models that I created because I wanted to learn how to use how to create an augmented reality iOS app. So if you click on the, if you are able to capture that QR code on the screen it takes you to the app store. You could also just search for, oh I don't have the name there. Sacred GSAR app is how you find it in the app store. It's not for Android, I'm not a developer so I was just kind of seeing how to do these things. I'm an Apple user so that's what I decided to go with and so this one is similar where there's a story map but this is mapping public art from Philadelphia, murals and sculptures and so this is the full map. They're all by black artists. It's not a comprehensive representation of murals. There are 3,600 murals that cover the city of Philadelphia. It's called Murals City for a reason. So there was no way I was gonna be able to capture all of those so I just had a small subset of murals that I worked with Murals Arts Philadelphia to identify that featured some type of, it was an African American iconic images resource and then I did some research on the artists to find out who was, which murals were painted by black artists and then went ahead with that. And so I'm going to come out of the presentation. Yes. And I'm gonna show you how the AR app works live. And so this was all made through Unity, that the app part of it with no coding involved. So as you capture the image that's on the map there's an altar that I built using 3D models of different objects from the projects that I've been working on. And the sculptures all rotate 360 and the murals just kind of swing back and forth because the backside of a 3D model of a mural is just the inverse of the mural. It's nothing really interesting to look at behind it. And they automatically change based on the photo. And so you can see there's the Kifuebe mask that's in the Philadelphia Museum of Arts collection. I'm trying to hold my hand as steady as possible. Okay, I'm gonna go back into this presentation. Yes. And the last project that I wanna highlight, which is something that's kind of been on the back burner a little bit throughout the entire fellowship so far. And now I'm actively working on it again. I made a 3D model of a black woman owned bookstore in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia called Harriet's Bookshop. And it's named Harriet after Harriet Tubman. And I'm turning it into a virtual exhibition space. So I was able to add all of the African sculpture 3D models that I have. I've got an additional set of African instruments that I modeled that are from the blocks in collection that are also in the space. And it's also got the models of the public art. They're on the lower level, which it's going to now. And then I added images of artwork by black women who are from Philadelphia or have lived in Philadelphia that are in the PMA's collection. There aren't that many black artists in our collection. And so it's really nice to be able to highlight them through these projects. So right now I'm at the step of adding interactivity to this where you can pick up an object and then a label pops up and it's narrated to you for accessibility. So you have the option of reading it or listening to it. We're both if you wanna do that. And it shows an image of the object in real life because the 3D model doesn't always look exactly the same. So that kind of helps with being able to imagine it outside of the virtual space. But I have been able to test it and put on the headset and everything, but that's something you have to do at the scholar studio. All right, so thank you all for listening. I'm really excited to hear any questions you might have and you can reach me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com slash in slash not just with PhD. And this is just a TikTok that I made actively doing the photogrammetry with one of the African sculptures. What does it follow? Thank you all so much. Those were wonderful views into the tremendous work that these folks have been doing. We have a few minutes for questions and I'd invite you to pop up to the microphones. If you have any questions either for a specific panelist or for the group, while you're gathering up, I have one quick one to maybe get us started. And that's this. Fast forward 20 years from where you are now. I mean, just listening to this, you've already done an amazing number of different things in your professional careers. You've gotten doctorates, you've built resources, you've taught, you've done things in museums. Where would you like to end up in 20 years or so? Would it be a faculty thing running a museum? You want to be sort of a public intellectual, run an archive? Where do you think you'd like to land? Okay. Hello. Okay, Cliff, I think that's a great question. In 20 years, I hope that I'm still doing the type of work that I'm doing, but maybe on a larger scale. I'm excited to be joining the staff of Rice University next year as the university historian. And I'm excited to be able to continue the programming that we'll be doing at Rice. Hi. Okay. Thank you very much for that question. And I think in 20 years, I want to, first of all, end up being happy. But at the same time, just doing this amazing work, I look forward to being a faculty member. And as a matter of fact, I just got a position at the Ohio State University as the assistant professor in the university libraries. And I'll be beginning next year for. And so I'm excited to start that and also look forward to all the exciting things that I'll do related to data management and working with the libraries and everyone who is interested in data. Okay, yes, it's working. I'm really excited that you asked that question because there's something that I usually say during my presentation that I forgot to mention and it's the answer to the question, which is that I have been doing this work and building workflows that would be, that would work at small institutions that have limited capacity, limited funding, limited staffing, all of that, right? I was able to do a lot of this stuff either by myself or with one other person. I didn't have to use a huge grant or anything in order to afford it. Most of the tools that I've been using are free. If they're not free, they're very, very inexpensive. And so coming from a space where we could sometimes look to a county council person to give us a couple thousand dollars to do some programming in their district, this would be something that they would be able to replicate at one of those types of institutions. And so I'm very active in the association for African-American museums. I'm a life member, which I'm very excited about. And I am currently on a working group to develop ways to build capacity using Traveling Shared and Collaborative Exhibitions. Two of us are DH folks, myself and Dr. Brian Carter who runs the lab at University of Arizona. And so he and I have been talking about how we might be able to do some workshops for AAAM members so that the members can learn how to do this work without having to contract a large company or get a giant grant and bring on staff. They could really do it with the folks that they already have. There's no coding involved. So just someone who's interested in learning this skill has a little bit of time to add it onto any existing responsibilities, just kind of being realistic about what would be expected of that person. And so in 20 years, I hope, well, I hope it doesn't take that long to get to this point. But in 20 years I hope that I am actively doing that work and training other people on how to use, how to do ARVR, how we can build these projects for ourselves instead of allowing someone else to do that work on our behalf. All of that sounded amazing. Yeah, 20 years is a long time. And I want to be an educator and I want to keep trying to make the university a different kind of space than I think it currently is and kind of reimagining what it means to be a researcher and an educator. And really doing work, like this project I'm doing now, Otherwise Bodies, I hope it is community engaged, but also is the kind of research and work that builds community and connects existing communities to each other rather than it being like through a university necessarily. And that that could challenge kind of the epistemic boundaries and archival boundaries that we usually have. Do we have some questions from the audience? Here comes one. Thank you for this. It's really, really exciting work. It's just, and Brian, Kim, Galen, all these people I love and work with. So I'm really glad to see that. There's a question, an interesting generational gap here. So I'm going to ask the question from my side. A lot of you are doing interdisciplinary and working across boundaries of community, academic institutions. I'm wondering if you have any advice because the problem with working with communities, community orgs, higher education institutions keeps cropping up in a lot of our work. How do you work across those boundaries? Any advice would you like to share in terms of how you have accomplished any challenges regarding community-based work with the kind of things that you're doing? Excellent question. So these are personal experiences, but I found that just being present in the community is something that helps build community in and of itself. There tends to be some distrust, mistrust of academic institutions and sometimes we tend to extract instead of pour in. And so for me, it's very important that I'm pouring in and breaking down barriers. There's a saying at Rice that things that happen beyond the hedges, right? And we're really trying to pull some of those hedges down. We're doing that work through the metadata that we're updating in the library. We're doing that work in imagining archival futures that include more community voices, but we're also being very intentional about the work that we're doing with communities. And part of that is just being present in the community, being active in the community and allowing for those relationships to be built organically, but then also tapping into those networks. So for example, there are several community members that we've worked with that knows someone that knows someone, right? And so one of the things that I found to be very rewarding in this work is building that network, that family, that group of like-minded individuals that are interested in being in the trenches with you because it is difficult work, doing community-driven work and recognizing that there is a history of extraction that has to be addressed before we can move forward in a healing way. Yeah, and I would just, you know, had to, the amazing advice that Pasha already gave. And for me, one unique thing that I've always, you know, considered when it comes to, you know, building community relationships and, you know, citizen science and things like that is that I usually make sure that the research that we are doing, you know, as a group or as a university is community oriented, you know, so we don't just, when we are relating with community members, we don't just come up with a research that and push it to them and just believe that it will benefit them but axing them for their needs, you know, and, you know, tying what we do to the community needs so that, you know, it is actually really impactful. So that way, you know, we meet with, you know, community champions and people who are community oriented and know the needs of some of these communities and then we connect that way and we build networks and relationships in ways that really matter, you know, answering community questions that matter to the community. So that's what I feel like it's most important to start breaking, you know, community engagement barriers. And so it's really answering their needs, knowing their needs, not assuming their needs, you know, knowing these needs and then channeling, you know, symposium research and whatever universities, you know, and other partners have in mind and then focusing on answering those needs. So I have come at community in kind of a different way. At some point during my fellowship, I had to think about who is my actual target audience and I realized that it's, like I said before, other museum professionals. So I've really tapped into my professional association as a way to get in touch with those folks. The working group that I'm a part of came out of the 2017 needs assessment to identify what are the actual struggles of our member institutions, the majority of whom are small institutions, of course. And so we're doing an updated study about, well, what are the perceived challenges when it comes to doing collaborative exhibitions or to using digital tools for those exhibitions? And we're hoping that we'll be able to do some workshops before this working group term is up in a couple of years. But I've really been keen on making sure that I'm developing tools that are developing workflows that will work for our member institutions. And then because they are usually really tapped into their local communities, that's a way that they're able to kind of target their audiences more specifically than me trying to figure it out for them. I'll just briefly add. So I'm really excited that I get to learn from the mentors I had on the screen earlier, Dr. Kim Gallin and Dr. Sashway and Jessica Marie Johnson. They all live in Baltimore and East Baltimore. I also live in East Baltimore. And particularly, Dr. Kim Gallin has had a long relationship before she moved institutions with St. Francis, who again is a PI, a co-PI on that Mellon grant. So really having community organizations be PIs on these grants and then being able to use that money to go directly into communities. So the community data stewards, part of the community data lab of Black Beyond Data, they are all paid positions for community members to be the community data stewards. And again, also in the future, we want to have a community advisory board for the racism and medicine component that would also be full of paid community members. And so it would be compensated and very formally structured in that way. I hate to say this, but we are at time. That was, I think you'll agree, a really fascinating set of presentations. And thank you for that wonderful question, by the way, that we closed on because that really is a major challenge in so many projects now. I am hopeful that all of you will be with us for at least most of the meeting that you'll be able to join us for the reception tonight. I'm sure there are many people who are eager to chat with you. And please join me in a final round of applause for our wonderful Clearfellas.