 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another ADHDC talk. I always say, I do have a tentative deficit, but the ADHDC talk, the Alabama Digital Humanities Center. Today we're joined with the folks from the Alabama Memory Project, Dr. John Giggy and Isabella Garrison. The Alabama Memory Project is a project that seeks to document and map over 800 lynchings and attempted lynchings in Alabama from 1865 to 1981. Under Principal Investigator, Dr. John Giggy, the Alabama Memory Project engages undergraduates and graduate students from a variety of disciplines in the documentation process, which empowers students through experiential learning while building an archive that documents the legacy of racial violence in the state of Alabama. And this project researches a new county each semester. Dr. John Giggy is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies and Director of the Summer Cell Center at the University of Alabama. And Isabella Garrison is a doctoral student in the History Department at the University of Alabama and also the Vivian Malone Community History Fellow at the Summer Cell Center. Welcome, John and Isabella. I am really excited about our conversation today. And I need to pull up my questions. In all of that, I minimized a bunch of screens and minimized my questions so they will. I'll hop them in just a second here. So while I am pulling this up, and you guys tell me about how this project started and sort of how you. I think this is more a question for you, John. How, how did you imagine this project up? And how did it sort of evolve into what it is right now? Well, first, thanks for having us this morning. It's great to be here and to, we've talked over the last few months about our work together and this is just a nice natural progression. The project began really in a conversation with a group of attorneys based in Montgomery from Equal Justice Initiative. And I've been working with them to begin to imagine the process of lynching or mapping lynching victims around the country. And what they asked me to do was to imagine a more local state based project that principally looked at two things. One is how do you work with undergraduates at the highest level to do some of the more complicated research and social sciences. And secondly, how do you begin to create a digital memorial that once has a forward facing research component but also attempts to commemorate or moralize lives lost unjustly over the last century and a half. And that led to Alabama memories, which was an intentional effort is an intentional effort to research and map and recover and memorialize the many lives lost to lynching. And this is from most lynching projects is that it's focused on one state. Secondly, it looks not simply at the guiding questions in the history of lynching historically which is where did someone lose their life and why this project because it has a commemoration focus also adds to those questions and says, who were these folks when they lived, where do they, who do they love, where do they go to school, where do they work, who do they leave behind. And those research questions then lead to a deep dive on a semester semester by basis in which students myself including Isabella attempt to unpack this history of lynching. What's critical for students is to get beyond normal safeguards or leading questions so they'll spend many, many months ransacking only census records but going to court archives around the state trying to find any kind of leaf that suggest a footprint left by these folks. Perhaps most importantly that was trying to make this accessible to the public. And over the years we've steadily developed a much closer relationship to metadata analysis and the adhc in an effort to create a public facing and public accessible research project. And I know from the last few years, a main constituent of the research are families of loved ones who lost their lives to lynching. So probably obligation is can I work with students and Isabella and others to create a robust research hosting platform that eventually becomes accessible to the public so that a relative can learn much more about their, their lost ones than before. And also if they want to add to that in some capacity, offer a thought and I do maybe a prayer that we have a receptacle for that in some meaningful way. Wow. It's, it's such an amazing project and I've been aware of it for several years. You know, you have a certain amount of notoriety within this library, even because of the tasks that you have given undergraduates for researching these lynchings going through newspapers. And I want to make sure that as people are thinking about your project their understanding the depth of research that your undergraduate students are engaging in where they are. They are going through microfilm, they're, they're just, they're just like reading for hours and hours trying to get stuff they're working on a pretty high conceptual level with reference librarians and archivists in order to obtain the documentation that you guys are getting to go into this project and I think that's, that's something that has impressed me over the years with your project. Because I get to see what's happening from the library side of what in undergraduates are, are learning to do and this is, this is by far some of the more sophisticated research that I've seen. It's, it's good to bring this up because the project is deeply collaborative at every level so students work in teams, but I also work in teams right like I work with many folks in the library or at who. And I work with folks around the state who want to offer ideas or research tips or not. But the key for me as an historian is kind of design research at the highest level for undergraduates not just doctoral students but what does it mean to work with someone 181920 and give them a near a possible tasks to track down the life of someone that was never meant to be discovered that's been hidden in many ways or written about in a wrong and an unjust manner. And so that leaves to a kind of brash investigation of every possible source. Those are often the most revealing are the ones that are most unlikely. Sometimes we discover a prison record in which someone has an intake and you see what their, what their body how it was described. Sometimes we find in a black newspaper an obituary that offers a different understanding of the life lost. Recently, I've been doing oral histories of people who lost loved ones to lynching, perhaps most powerful was working with a woman who saw a lynching. What that was like for her and her mission was to discover that particular injustice, particularly for her when she saw the lynching she lost her voice for two years as a young child. And so now she wants literally rediscover that voice and work with us to attempt to put words and images, not visual images but images in her mind and what that looked like for her and why it was important to remember it. And bring Isabella because she's actually wasn't undergraduate in this project and now as a grad student like what are your thoughts about the research. Yeah, I don't think there is a comparable class on this campus and I've had a lot of time here I got my undergraduate degree here my master's and now I'm in my doctoral studies. And from my experience, especially within the humanities. I don't know of another class to ask the same thing of students, but equally I don't know of another class that gives students as much as this class does. It is sincerely deeply collaborative at every level we have incredible resources from the library from community partners outside of campus, including church leaders and members in the test school so community. Our colleagues at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, and then even our colleagues at EGI who have been supported from the beginning. And our work though has evolved to become even more local even more personal. The oral history is talking to you speaks of our ones that have pushed us as a project to reaffirm our initial goal to memorialize these lives in a way that's radical based off of what the publishing history has previously asked which is often for these kind of meta studies. Our hope is that in being hyper local and hyper personal students change, right that I as a student I know I have a radically different understanding relationship of what history can do. And what my responsibility is as a person that lives in the south, because of this class in a way that if I had just sat in a lecture or simply read a newspaper and accepted what it said rather than probing it and doing what this course asks of you. I wouldn't have the same. You all have a sense of some of the emotional impact that it has on your students as they move through this. I'm sure that's part of the conversation. When you begin realizing that you know you're researching violent death. Yeah, that's that's part of every class is asking students how they're doing and being very upfront that sometimes when you research histories like this, it can be really complicated and pick up thoughts in your own life from the past. And my job there is to be supportive but also directional. It might be valuable if you just speak to someone about what you're feeling right now. It doesn't happen very often, but it's part of the obligation of the class is to not to run from that but to say we can work through this in a ways we have resources on campus to help you. I think perhaps more universally though is that this is the class that stays with my students the most. This is the one that asks students can I do more, or can I kind of think about research and humanities in a different way, or more powerfully, why is it that this history so literally hidden. Why is it I have to work with eight different professionals around campus just to begin to unpack sources and allow for a different telling of history. That's powerful for young people. Right. Why didn't I learn this as a young person why don't I get pushed to ask these questions elsewhere. For myself on an emotional level it's tiring sometimes these oral histories are really complicated. I try to radically dissenter myself as professor as much as possible allow oral histories to lead me not me lead the world history. It also means I have to stop sometimes, because sometimes folks don't want to share an idea and it's not my responsibility or obligation to push any further. But I think in the end it creates a longer timeline for the research, but it produces a much broader and robust understanding of how the past operates and reaches into the into the present. Such that I'm often literally at the mercy of someone's memory do they want to share what part they want to share it. Do they want to offer up a record obituary, a picture. Sometimes the answer is no and that's okay. That's okay sometimes. The work is deeply a relationally driven as much it is a project that asks for a really high level of historical work that is very traditional right that comes to whatever the archive can offer you that asks you to push beyond. We are only able to do that and then to sustain the emotional effort it requires because of the relationships in the community the class builds. I think that was distinct in my experience as a freshman in this course was feeling a real community in the class not just colleagues or classmates I could check in on the people who are united in a value system and admission. And that's been constant I've been able to see the class and every iteration since then. And that's a constant for every class, which I think provides part of the necessary backbone when we're asking students to engage in this type of work and when students are invited and we get to join and Dr. does these oral history is I think it would be impossible to engage with those in a way that is respectful and productive. If we were not constantly engaging these conversations together and able to trust each other to do that. So at every level of the work needs these relationships and needs this trust that we build. I think this might be a nice time for you guys to show us some of the stuff that you've gathered and, and, and give us some visuals of this project because it's, it's all of this documentation but as a DH project it's built out into an incredibly visually stimulating and aesthetically motivating project that a person experiences as they move through it. Yeah, so today what we'll share with you guys is both what we aim for our public facing website to look like. We're working with the ADHC to reboot the public facing website to make it more accessible by migrating from WordPress to omega s to meet what our metadata needs are now which are increasingly complex and we initiated the website seven years ago. We'll also share with you a unique data processing tool that an undergraduate student named Nick Daria worked with us to develop called research Alabama memory. This is how we make this level this tool is how we make this level of research complexity and metadata complexity accessible to undergraduates basically transforms everything we know metadata should do into a Google sheet at a higher level and Google form that allows students to engage with it in a way that makes sense for them. One thing that's interesting with the project is students often want to take pictures of where they've been. And so we've been with and it's voluntary, but many of them are drawn to landscape. As they spend 1215 sometimes more than a year worth of weeks in a community, they would they take pictures, many of them are quite haunting we're developing a kind of standing series of images that ask us why. In this case, we're looking at a piece of Alabama's landscape in which there was a killing here, but there's nothing here but a small tree and this is roughly the exact area. But it's also an invitation for all of us to ask why, why do we know more why is there no memory. And that leads to obligation like how do we do things differently how do we begin to on earth documentation that can lead to a different understanding of this particular area that's so desolate and bereft of a kind of understanding what happened here and then a moralization to some kind of the life that was lost. And this is also a response to the current historiography of lynching history, part of the goal with site visits and encouraging students to engage with this which they don't do alone. But if a student chooses to travel around the state, Dr. Giggy is always with them, a graduate student or other students were always with them, because this work is taxing and visiting the site is enormously emotionally difficult. And this historiography often focuses on scholarship focuses on images of lynchings when the actual murder happens. Something that we hold as a value for the project is recreating that visual imagery of lynching to think more about how can we more realize the life of a person, rather than simply the death and the murder. That's part of the goal of these images as well. I always make it a good point. When you think of the visual imagery of lynching it's always about the moment of the death. I'm not interested in that we're not interested in that rather, we find documentations that testify either to the life lived or in this case the life forgotten. So images we seek are ones that ask why, why is there no visual memory here, and how can we use our research and our heart to try to change that. We wanted to share with you a typical newspaper article that students will come across. When we guide students through research they start week one, right, they get a case assignment and they begin to impact newspapers. One of the things that makes lynching research enormously difficult is that you cannot just accept what a newspaper publishes right you can't just accept what a convict lease record shows you or what a governor's part and record shows you. One of the challenges that students face is going beyond what they maybe think is high level historical research gathering the data and accepting and pushing forward and instead reckoning with the fact that even this newspaper article from for many students the newspaper that they grew up with Montgomery advertiser is untrustworthy is pushing forward a narrative about lynching about a person's life that we need to deeply examine before and before it. Yeah, a big challenge of the work is that there's no such thing as a transparent fact that's history 101 but in the case of this class. So many of the sources come from white newspapers that have such a vested interest in creating narratives that criminalize often the black defendant, or the hero size a sheriff or white community. So big part of the class for students is how do you extract data from that. It's going to be trustworthy, but we have to begin to use to think about creating analytical tools to help explain the situation. And so often those, the meetings are with newspaper articles and then we work with them to extract what we can trust and not trust and then translate that into a metadata program of sorts. Again part of the difficulty is also that we're using these sources to try to uncover a person's life. So for a student what they have to learn and relearn and relearn throughout the semester is how do you read a source like this, and come away with something that could begin to resemble a biography of James or Molly's life right. So what a student would then draw from this is his age, perhaps he spent Montgomery area but that's what this article could offer for you about his life and that's probably the challenge here. So what's interesting here is there's a reference to a legal trial sorts. So that begins a pathway, can we get to the grand jury trial when we go to the court, can we ask about this can we find out the judge we find about the jury can we locate who the circuit board. People were that we can begin to track their life that way. Yeah part of what makes the class exciting is that there's this constant fluidity of the research right that we have a model in our head of what we know students should do to just check off due diligence of covering databases and genealogical databases. Often each case had a different need and a research requirement. So a case like this one will require that student to visit Elmore County to go through those court records. So when a student finds a source like this. It's typically within the first couple of weeks of research, and then they go to research Alabama memory. This is the platform developed by CS major named McDaria who took the course three years and chose to stay on is chosen to stay on every semester since this came out of a need to meet the growing needs of the project. We were working literally off of Google sheets to organize metadata which I think in an early iterations made complete sense right when we as a university still use the Google suite. But we don't need more and even before we switch over to Microsoft and to outlook. It became cumbersome and a wieldy we had so many sources were into the thousands of sources to documents visions lives that it didn't make sense and we need something that would also be accessible to students immediately they could visually process and understand rather than trying to explain to them every category of metadata. Yeah, so for me the key point here is undergraduate work with us to develop a research hosting platform that students have immediate access to and then it and then we basically pull from this and it's like a metadata platform. The key here is that undergraduates are designing leading in this case which they're writing code they're imagining the research platform. And it's a constant iterative process we get feedback most weekly from students asking for updates asking for tweaks. Yeah so you'll see here February update click to learn more right. There's an update every month that responds to student needs from the class, this one in part was just improving our OCR. The course passed when I started in the class, we had to manually transcribe every single source. We now have an OCR reader that we use for the source and that we're always working up bugs students always went up against the wall it's a handwritten source why can't OCR read this that's okay. But overwhelmingly the workload has shifted because of this. I want to show you guys know more in depth of what research album memory looks like. When you log in from the student end. You see a case that you're assigned any deadlines upcoming currently they don't have any research checks upcoming so they're not there. And then resources the resources leads you to the library's page that has all of our primary source bases and includes newspapers.com. It also includes pro quest newspapers or even going into genealogical sources like ancestry. It also includes the email for Alex Boucher who's a librarian who's worked with this project primarily for the last seven years. So everything the student should need is right here and hold right here for them. When you click in you'll see your assigned case is you can open up. One thing that we've added for this as well that works with the instructor side is the statistics things right. This shows you the statistics for the case what types of newspapers have been collected or documents have been collected. How many of their transcribed how many of them have images how many of them have the URLs that show the original source base. This allows us to very quickly check in on students metadata work and see are they keeping up with things do we need to lean in a little bit more. When you click into your case. It'll take you to the case number the date of the case location and the victims names. You can organize by creation date or title city publication date. We recently met with Nick and will add soon tabs to sort by source types in addition to this. You can download a CSV file here that shows you a batch editor of all your cases which is enormously useful. If you click here you can add a source from other cases if you have more than one case assigned, you can drag in sources and co edit again the way you wouldn't a Google doc right that way students will be all on the same page. When you click into a source. This is what was so valuable to us we wanted to be able to prompt for students to fill out standardized metadata for every single source and what we were running up against with Google Sheets was a lack of standardization. And over what do I put for a publisher if it's a marriage certificate how do I do this work with this that again looks really a lot like a Google form. It makes sense to students it makes the metadata accessible and it helps us keep things standardized. Yeah. This is a marriage certificate that I'm for a case from 1899 for a man named Lewis Wendell. This is transcribed if you can see here you can click into the attachment editor where the JPEG was uploaded and the OCR was uploaded OCR legacy, it'll be updated with our much update which we're excited about for a source like this one which is a a genealogical record out of the different records that we've decided and this was a longer conversation as well over the last several years of what better data categories we wanted to assign here for source types. This is a genealogical record, we could have been a state record but it's specific about that person's life so we wanted to make it clear there. There there's no author. There is no specific publication space unless we wanted to say in Elmore County, but we will have the date and the transcription for a source like this one. I wanted to show you guys briefly what it looks like to upload a source like the one we just looked at all together. So when we look at this newspaper source. Right. How will it look like for a student to upload that themselves how will they navigate that. The goal is that what I experienced as a freshman which was I'm making sound very very difficult it really wasn't but it felt very very difficult oh my gosh I have to manually transcribe everything. I have to get the metadata right is streamline. So the first thing a student should do is go into their files find the image of whatever source they have. And then go into the OCR, which will run this for them. The OCR works best with newspaper articles like this right that has one or two columns that's pretty easy to work for. And through sometimes the OCR necessitates manual transcription. That's just how it is that's how this work is, especially again with genealogical sources like handwritten letters and notes. You can edit this OCR through you can edit and accept or copy over, accept and save, and then you would put in the newspaper article title. You'd put source type which is the first thing you should do that's a newspaper, no authors here for us authors are typically specific to oral histories. We totally honest, the publisher is the Montgomery advertiser publication place is Montgomery Alabama, and then the date. The thing that's really important here is the publication space. This is where the bulk of our data analysis has been thus far is using the place of publication to understand how lynching research and knowledge of lynching travels across the country. And we jump in there. So what we track many different things but what's most interesting for students is how so many articles get published about one lynching in Alabama and sometimes we'll have 200 articles around the country literally from someone who lost their and that allows us over a period of years to map thousands of what I call publication networks, such that we begin to see a different way to understand how ideas about black criminality or black guilt, or the presumption of black will get developed nationally. We track, for example, lots of publications appearing in the in New England, an upper Midwest, and that often maps along past a black migration. So many ways in this case these individuals from Alabama, or other parts of the deep can never escape these ideas about them. And it just gives a different understanding of how a narrative about black guilt and black criminality again development take hold nationally even though crimes are with lynching history tended focus in the south exclusively. One of the things we're really excited about moving forward with our migration from WordPress to America is the increased ability to use what America offers to do analysis just like this right America's mapping will work better with the metadata, or more fluidly. America is timeline examples will allow us to map these things out as well. I wanted to highlight just a couple more things on the metadata one is an alt text box. Of course it's necessary for every image that doesn't already have a transcription so students are trained in what it means to create alt text as well. If I were checking this for a student's work I would say where's your URL why so I not see where you got this from if it's newspapers if it's pro quest whatever it may be. You can also click here to get the case date, which will take you ideally closer to what the actual date of this is so that makes things easier for students. One of the big strengths of research album memory is that it allows us to download every single source organized by case and by victim into one massive CSV file that we can easily import into a website so that we're not manually loading every single piece of data. That was the original aim of research and actually was in addition to allowing it more fluid experience or undergraduates, it made our publication process much smoother. Students can keep research notes right here, but those will never be published as they're always internal everything above the research notes though. That's what's published right that's one of the reasons why we spend so much time working with students training them a metadata processing, but also checking in every single week what are the students working on as everything transcribe. What are is again an enormous tool for us and just been really helpful. Yeah, the research knows they're an interesting because that's where students breadcrumb. They tell us where they've been they ask questions there and we can go back in for that's another way to invite them to be an intellectual. We're not interested just what you find but how you found it. So tell us tell us where you were tells the mistakes you made maybe those are often the most interesting pieces of this slide for me as a professor is to see how their minds working and how it changes over time. Yeah, so it's actually a requirement for students to have research notes on every source they find for the first third of the semester, because we want them to begin to train themselves to think that way but it's also just valuable information for us as instructors is interesting to see how different students approach the research. The way they upload to research album memory is paired with a blog post or journal entry on their blackboard site. The blogs of specific prompts asking them to think about their research in different ways and the journals provide a private space only Dr. Gigi and whoever else is an instructor that semester will be able to read them for students to reflect on the emotional tool, the research. As much as this site facilitates the data entry and makes much of this so much easier I cannot emphasize enough but it works much better press. One of the great things about work with a mecca as it will allow for different kinds of narrative analysis, I think more quickly students are asking questions that can be best answered by relying on a mecca as so for example how does the presentation of law enforcement change over time in these articles tracking them over 100 years. How does the portrayal of the victim, which is typically a white woman and over 30 cases how does that change over time what's the vocabulary being applied. So it's nice is to be able to take a student inquiry and demand and then answer it to a metadata process that I think will be very rich. What's nice about this and this is really really new and sort of the field of racial violence is being able to track thousands of pieces of data over time to give a sense of how the narrative about life's lost about lynching changes and just allow students and ourselves to pause and see how vocabulary changes and evolves over time. And much of the historiography, as far as been concerned with individual cases and starts with the death and moves from there right has this affected community. So again, every part of this project is designed to facilitate what actually happens before the death, who was this person what was this community before this murder happens. So we're designing at every level to meet what's thus far been underrepresented in our scholarship. I just wanted to quickly show you what the admin side looks like. This is where we can see statistics for every single case that's ongoing which the cases are wiped at the end of each semester and it automatically uploaded through that import export CSD process to our back end of our websites. This gives us a quick overview to see how is the class doing globally and then we can go into individual individual cases and see how each student is doing. So here's user management, which again allows us to manage what students have access. Nick put a contact Nick button because he did make this thing, but that's very useful. This is where we export sources this is a thing that's been a godsend truly. We're still in development for what that will look like to transfer to America, but already the process has proven to be much more fluid easier than trying to force that into what we're press offers. And then here's where we add in new locations are we doing a new county do we need to add a different source type do we have something underrepresented here. That's where all of this information lies for us and again it's facilitated research that is just enormously complicated for students to learn for us to teach and teach well. This has been an enormous tool for us. So it's research Alabama memory, it's always in process something we value for this is that we're able to respond to student feedback so regularly that students can see that they have a problem with CR and it's addressed quickly which happened last month. That students can see actually there's a way to sort sources that we need different. It's been useful. We want to show you now is what we imagine for our website going forward. Our public facing website thus far has, I think done a good job of representing what the research did up until we changed our methodology a couple of summers ago to give a little bit of a backstory there we originally based counts of victims in the state off of pre existing data from CSDE from Tuskegee and from EGI, all of us do excellent work, categorizing and organizing the legacy of lynching the state in the southeast in the nation. But a couple of summers ago some undergraduates and graduates work together and just shifted their search terms a little bit change the way they searched and found that the 11 cases without existing in Tuskegee County, we're actually closer to 78. And now since then we know that they're closer to 100 victims of lynching in the county. So, what we see here is an older representation of our project. What's interesting that is the impulse to really refigure the search imagination came both from undergraduates and grad students but also people that want to speak about the impact of lynching in their life. One woman who was older in their 90s, and she said, I'm going to tell you a story. You don't have to believe me, but you won't find it in a newspaper. And then she proceeded to talk about a lynching in her family. But the invitation there was many full but one piece of that was to go back to traditional ways of searching and imagining research and shake it. Maybe we made mistakes we have made mistakes maybe our terms are different our chronological brackets are different. We have an invitation with different people, some of whom were in the academy some who are not. So marrying that invitation to rethink the research process with undergraduate and graduate energy led to a robust re accounting of the number of victims that are documented. So in Tuskegee County we moved from 11 document cases to over 100. The state itself, the published list of lynching victims up until very recently was roughly 430. Now we're pushing close to 1000. And this is largely because of an invitation from an older citizen to rethink methodology, and then working with students to take that seriously and change every term change the brackets. The other piece of this of course is technology right as databases are becoming more accessible as our libraries and our institutions invest in them. It makes possible redoing or rethinking of the limits of research up until this point. One thing that our course benefits from is alumni returners. I just referenced a couple of times graduate students that returned to work. Many of them are like me they had the class and undergrad and they've stayed at UA for their graduate degrees, and want to continue to invest in the project. So that sense of a network of a community powers much of this innovation and allows us to respond quickly. When our invested community members say you need to stop and rethink this you need to stop and do something different. We have groups of students that have stayed with the work and have responded in a way that sustained and isn't incidental. What we wanted to display here is what our current source archive looks like this is something we again hope to improve upon with a Mecca this is based off of our WordPress model. And this also reflects an older understanding of our research works. This allows people to search based off of source types victim names we have an example here for Cornelius and William Robinson remember in Pickens County in 19 of six. Currently if you go by a victim you'll see every source related to them and you have to individually click into each source a point of innovation that is a part because of working with adhc and with Sarah, is that we're going to include now data packets where one person can very easily download an Excel document something that's accessible regardless of the technology you have to look at every single source we've been able to compile victims. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you a lot of credit here Sarah the notion of creating a data packet that's easily extractable for someone who wants more information about an individual and I'm, we're most concerned with family members people that lost someone. And we give them what they want. In a quick way, but also the other side of this is they want to leave something for us that we can begin to work with them to maybe expand a database or think differently about things we've missed or need to do more with. So all of the work that students do on research am is then represented here in the source archive and then represent with the individual victims case files. That's why the metadata is so important that's why keeping these careful records so important. Each victims life is also paired with in addition to the moralization to their life, a research summary from students that guides them exactly through what those research notes allow to say this is what I did and this is what I would do next if I could if I had the time. Again, the value here is democratization. We want to show any invested community member exactly the steps that were taken and the steps they could then take next. Often what that results in is exactly like what Dr. Gigi mentioned from Miss Lacey, the older woman in Elmore County said you have to listen to me you have to hear me when I tell you this won't be there. People engaging and saying you miss something you need to push here. That's been a real strength that I think of the project. So once we have the sources organized and available to people in an archive, we then map them. We try to literally recreate the landscape of Alabama and here at Tuscaloosa County. We do that through our site visit photos and then through this through a map that exclusively is concerned with sites of racial terror. Yeah, this is an older work up and it's very much in process but we're, we're managing now is the mecca basically unfolds into a county map of the state. Then when people click on individual counties they're going to have access to the data in a way that's digestible but also extractable. There's just a prototype from a few of these six months ago. The Tuscaloosa County is 76 and then clicking on that leads you to a map of Tuscaloosa County where individual victims are literally pinned on the map. And then if you mouse or where you get a thumbnail sketch of the life live in the life lost. So, what we recognize to you is that invested community members will engage with the site probably in one of two ways. One will be to search for a name that they know, and the other will be to go to their town. We want to make those things accessible and forefront them as points of navigation. Because we recognize that this is a local project this is something that our community is invested in we want to facilitate that investment as much as we can. Finally, this is what our landing page will look like this is a mock up from our old site, but we want again to value and privilege what it means to rethink the landscape of Alabama. This is in Coaling. This is from the lynching in 1898. There's no marker here. This is a real line there's no way unless you're a family member a descendant or a person that worked on this research to know that there's an act of violence here. We want to make sure that the site keeps close this idea of a moralization. I was just going to think about things I wish I had done earlier or differently. And I did have done a really good job from the get go like teaching about the history of lynching and challenging folks to think differently. I think I came too late to aggressive partnerships on the digital side. I relied on sort of older technologies and even older imaginations. Secondly, I wish I told myself this will take more time than you think. I think when you work in a team when you imagine yourself in a lab and not just by yourself with a student or two timelines longer. And what I've discovered is this kind of work requires a long timeline but it promises a more robust and maybe a truer broader history than we've had before. Part of the timeline as well as it encourages students to come back, whether it be as undergraduates or grad students or most recently visited with three alums from several years who are doing this kind of work elsewhere. I wish I had thought hard about the timeline and then more aggressively intersected with the digital parts that are not part of this project and could have been part of it earlier on. That said though, this is also technologically sensitive, right? Omega S is much more of an industry standard now than it was five or six years ago. So we have to respond to that as well as constantly hang on to the innovation wave and making sure we're not getting overwhelmed by it but staying with it. I think that's something that's been interesting about our conversations that we've been having is like, how do you document all of the research that you've done and keep it organized with all of your metadata and your items attached? How do you keep that in the most stable way and then consider building out these big projects as they're not secondary but they're like the larger steps. So you have the basics of a CSV or just an Excel spreadsheet that has everything in it. And then the project is able to take advantage of some of these other technologies for the purpose of visualization and analysis but you have your stable data set. And that's something that I'm seeing pretty ubiquitously across projects that I'm talking with that folks really are focusing on that visual representation through the digital project. And perhaps neglecting the stabilization of that data for future access and archiving purposes. So that's a really good point and so there's always a tension for non-DH specialists like myself, right? What you just said could be really terrifying, like, oh my God, what am I going to be doing, right? So you have to mix a sensitivity that with also a kind of brashness. Well, yes, but I will get there. I'll work with you or other professionals but also students to get there. There's this tension between you have to ask those questions. How do you stabilize the data for the long term? How do you imagine creating and crafting research programs so that visualization becomes something important but not allow that to stymie the teaching, right? Or sort of slow the starting point on for too long. Yeah, I think you guys have a really good sort of workflow and process in place to allow the data to sit. Yeah, that's six years. Well, what I'm seeing right now. It looks really good right now. You've got some of these things, you know, figured out in a really elegant way. And I'm super excited about it. I want to hear a little bit. We talked about the project, the project. Isabella, I want to hear a little bit about how this has shaped you as a researcher and sort of like. How you see yourself in this project and then what do you see yourself doing with all of this experience. Like, at a certain point, you graduate. And your doctor Isabella. And what happens with that. So do you slowly turning towards me because he would also like to know the answers to some of those questions. So this course is in this project is foundational to not just what I think I should be doing as a historian, but how I should live like as a person in the south I mean that seriously. And that's not something I came to after the first semester. Actually yesterday, we were jokingly going back through some of the first emails from that first class because Dr. Gaggy was trying to organize a swarm of things and one of the things I saw on that was how little I did as a freshman. How little I did how little work I put in to a project that I recognized could be transformative but I was at that point, largely unwilling to engage with that to take that risk. Totally honest. It took years of being invited back in of Dr. Gaggy allowing us to engage with the work over several years for me to click it in a different way. One of the things that this work led me to you was working queer history, which may be on paper at first glance sounds disparate like these are two separate impulses and ideas. But the power of plumbing history that has been intentionally kept from our educational systems has been intentionally and violently sometimes hidden. I want to think about how I see that in other ways across the southeast and especially as a person who grew up queer in the south and believed a myth that I was the only person, right. That's not true. And I know that now based off of sustained historical work, not just in exactly queer history but in this project on this project asks. This is also I mean practically giving me like a high level of research skills. Right, that's fine, that's good. But what this project is most demanded of me is a high level of intellectual and emotional engagement and work that otherwise if I was numb to I just can't imagine where I'd be and where I'd be right now. I only want to be a historian and I'm the reason I can really only imagine myself in a PhD right now is because of this work because of the time to spend with students with community members who choose to give us their time and their stories which is overwhelming and humbling truly. I mean, it's the only thing I can imagine myself doing right now because of a long journey over seven years of engaging not engaging as much as I should have. And getting to work with students and see that what I experienced in the class and let it over a longer timeline prompted myself is not specific to me but actually universal. I've been doing this work and confronting head on a history of violence in the south and seeking a point of moralization from that that across the board asks all of us to think about ourselves and how we exist in the south how we choose to exist on this campus but we're out of here in our own homes and our own lives. So what that means for me after I finished the PhD asked me when I'm done with the PhD. A lot of this now is risking and trusting right trusting that the process of the work. And what I know is valuable to me what I know I should be spending my time on will point me to what I should do after when I am Dr Isabella. So check in in five years and we'll see. I think Sarah is one of the political points buried in Isabella's few paragraphs there is that the research on lynching or which can be which narratively looks like anti blackness. We've been discovered that many of those expressions and narrative tropes get applied to anti queerness. So wasn't expected going in, but now it becomes more and more obvious as we we look and sort of compare how stories or fictions get applied to different groups of marginalized Americans. Some of the things you're working on right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that that is, that is an area that lots of researchers are discovering a lot of overlap in. I know it's, it's pretty prominent within my own work as well. That overlap of intersectionality and how it impacts folks. As you're really looking at challenges and privileges and lack of privileges, and the way that we talk about people based on where they are on that sort of spectrum or it's more of a network. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you've mentioned alumni, and you've shown us this amazing project that Nick has done and I'm wondering what happens when Nick graduates and when does that happen and like what happens when a big part of your project. Moves on. Have you experienced that kind of project loss for lack of a better. Yeah. Yeah. In the past, and how do you plan for it and do you have, do you have like a system where a peer is going to move into that. Yeah, so part of it is you mentioned this earlier like imagining processes of standardization that aren't dependent on individuals. Right. That said though we do rely on individuals with certain skill sets that are computer based in particular and fortunately we've had a strong succession of CS majors or CS affinity majors that are interested in getting under the hood and constantly thinking alongside of us. How do we create research hosting platforms that can unfold seamlessly into metadata analysis acquisition. And as you say, trying to make the process as stable as possible such the data itself becomes preserved in a stable environment for for the next generation of students. Yeah, I think that that sense of sustainability for the project was a growth point earlier on how do we make sure we can make this process as fluid as possible. It's something we're constantly responding to whether it's on the teaching side. Every semester the class now is co taught along with that you get by a graduate student. How do we make sure incoming students have the tools they need to teach as well as they can and to feel confident in that. Additionally, then how do we make sure the project can change hands smoothly and that researchers and community members feels little disruption as possible. Right now we're in the process because graduating this semester as we speak. And so we're in the process of onboarding a new student who is both the CS and history major. So able to take their dual interests and skill set and begin to develop them towards the project and you actually just met with him yesterday and spoke more about what the new website on America can look like. His skill set lies primarily in development and aesthetics, and we're looking forward to working with him to take what we know is already powerful and America the data processing and then pair it with his gifts and the aesthetic side. I'm really excited to see what you guys do. I know that you'll, you'll radically change the look of that. You know, standard omega platform on the public side by, you know, changing up some of the CSS and the HTML, I think it's going to be, it's going to be fun. Yeah, I think so what you guys do. All right, well, you have anything else that you feel like you need to chat about. This for me it's been interesting. I kind of have been borrowing intellectual models from my scientist friends while creating labs basically, and trying to enfranchise students at every level undergraduate graduate, but also high school students. I've spent time in high school classes over the years sharing this research and inviting him to join us so much so that I have students coming from Oslo City Schools to UA do this work with us. So I guess for a humanity scholar maybe one of the message I like to carry to folks is to think deeply in a cooperative fashion, borrow other models from librarians or scientists who are who grow up thinking collaboratively whereas historians tend to, by default work by themselves which has its own values, but I think there's room for much more collaborative growth in the humanities that leads to these kinds of these kinds of projects. I just underscore that. I think one of the resources a university model gives us is time that you have a little bit more time to do this type of research and the just your infrastructure of what university can offer. I encourage other graduate students invested in humanities to see that as a value I recognize we're all trying to also finish it and get to the degree, but to see the value in collaborative work that demands more of us to ask us maybe to slow down to see an undergraduate's voice in the same way we went from a professor's to see value in a community members voice maybe but more than we would see in a professor's and allow that to prompt us to different model of work and a different type of work. I'm so excited about all of the possibilities that we're looking at in the future. This is great and this has been a really good conversation I know that I've heard many of these things before but there are definitely new things that I've heard today and I think one of my favorite things about the position that I'm in is just hearing all of the amazing work that's happening and just think to myself, I'm a little tiny part of it. I feel like this, this person makes to just like sit here and and see all of these amazing amazing things happening. So, thank you all for sharing this time with me. It's a generous of you to spend, you know, a full hour, just chatting with me about all of this stuff and letting me prod you with questions. So I would like to remind anybody who's listening, which is going to be, you know, I'm going to post this. So, there's nobody in the room at the moment but next week, I believe that our DH talk is on the cove collection, which is primarily being in our English department, but has some history and some philosophy and other humanities things in it. It's a very large textbook like DH project that is not happening on our campus. We're participating in it but it's not hosted by the ADHC and also upcoming on Wednesday for our lunch and learn is going to be, I believe, introduction to Python for the humanities which is always a fun time. That's going to be facilitated by Lance Simpson. So that's noon on Wednesday. I appreciate your time. I have to run to teach. Thank you. Thank you very much. And this is going to conclude our talk. Thanks Sarah. Bye bye now.