 So, hello everyone, I'm Amanda Rust, the Assistant Director of the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University Libraries, and I'm here to talk about Design for Diversity, which is an IMLS-supported project based at Northeastern. And I'm assuming everyone can hear me okay, because it's, yeah, crazy in here. So I have to start off with acknowledging the grant team. We are a team, so again, we're based in the Digital Scholarship Group. I'm the co-PI with our director, Julia Flanders. Kara Messina is our marvelous PhD student from English, who is our research assistant. And Sarah Sweeney is our library's digital repository manager, and she runs out the grant team. And I can't take credit for all the content in this presentation. So much of my understanding of these issues has really been through our collaborative work. And there's more. I have to thank all of my other library colleagues and our advisory board and our opening forum presenters and attendees and livestreamers and tweeters and now our core design group. So I put all these names up here not to overwhelm people with text, but to remind us that working on a big project like this really is collaborative. Most people don't need that reminder, but I think it helps to remind ourselves that grant-funded projects never only affect the grant team. It always has an impact on the larger organization in terms of labor. So why us? So I want to focus back on the digital scholarship group and why we thought that we had the gall and expertise to try to facilitate a project like this and why we thought that we should. So we have library staff who have extensive history designing, building and maintaining digital projects coupled with history of thinking about how to create data models and information systems representing historically marginalized groups. So one of the major centers for this is the Women Writers Project. It's the WWP is one of the longest running digital humanities projects. It's at 30 years old now and it's directed by my co-PI Julia Flanders. So the WWP for folks that aren't familiar with it is devoted to producing TEI-encoded versions of early modern women's writing. So this is a preservation and dissemination method. And for folks that work in TEI and XML as you know, it is all about data modeling, right? You model data all the time. And so that's one area that we have expertise in the library. I should note that the WWP was housed at Brown for a very long time. I think 26 of those 30 years so Northeastern cannot take all the credit. Don't tell them I said that. So that's one area. Additionally, our library repository is our own homegrown, Samvera, Hydra, Fedora repository developed by library staff. So we think of ourselves as designers and builders of systems. Our libraries, archives, and special collections in particular focus on the history of activism and social justice in Boston. And our university archivist, Jordanna Mkhanyi, has a lot of experience working with underrepresented groups and thinking about how to be a good partner to those groups. So our archives collect materials. For example, on the very painful conflict and racism that happened during the desegregation of Boston schools in the 1970s, they collect content on labor organization and protests for Chinese-American worker rights. In addition, there's our larger campus context where many of our campus partners have also a strong interest in social justice issues and directly work with material, again, coming from the history of marginalized groups. So for example, one of our campus partners, Ellen Cushman, works with collections of Cherokee language manuscripts. This is an image of Sequoian, which is the Cherokee script. I am so privileged to have been able to work on this project and learn more about this. We don't have time right now, but definitely Google Sequoian, learn more about the Cherokee language. It's amazing history. Ellen is a member of the Cherokee tribe and works with other members of that tribe. And we are working with them to build a transcription and translation system that will actually be used to build language learning materials, right? So this is a language perseverance project. Finally, our campus has a focus on experiential learning. It's a big buzzword people are probably familiar with that puts a real concrete emphasis on projects that go into the community. And I'm using air quotes on purpose because going into the community is something that's easy to say, but difficult to do well. So in applying for the IMLS grant, we were thinking of ourselves as builders who want to build better technologies, knowing that problems are both technical and social. So why now, right? So that's why us and why now. And here I just want to bring together probably in a kind of sloppy way, but a bunch of ideas around this idea of or the phrase community archive. And I can sort of ask questions and I'm wondering about the experience of folks in the audience as well. How many times have you or your organization been asked to lead or tasked to lead projects described by phrases like local history, capturing history, underrepresented voices, community partnerships, is a sort of really hot thing now. Digital archives, social media archives, community engagement, right? And finally community archives. And when I say hot topic, I don't in any way mean to sort of discount the work that goes into it, but more acknowledge that I think universities and higher ed organizations can sometimes use these projects in really mercenary ways, right? And so there's a lot of work across disciplines where people are creating new digital collections. A, in partnership with outside groups. B, in partnership with groups that have been historically disenfranchised and marginalized. And C, that in the higher ed framework fit into these project-based, experiential, hands-on learning models. So basically we were being asked to do a lot of work in this area. So the Design for Diversity Project. And my own elevator pitch for this, the way that I think of it is in concrete terms, as our partners are digitizing and translating precious and priceless items like Cherokee manuscripts, how can we design systems that are responsible towards those items? Particularly when those items belong to groups that have historically at best been ignored by the cultural heritage sector. And at worst, actively harmed by the cultural heritage community. So these are really big questions. We're gonna answer them all right now. And so we wanted to create something that was impactful and designed for circulation and use. So therefore the primary outcome of our grant will be a teaching and learning toolkit that we are going to release in fall 2018. We chose a toolkit format in addition to a traditional white paper because we thought that it would provide concrete examples coupled with theory and invite audiences to be active users by being a model that you might work through, right? Either on your own or with a group. And sort of rather than provide a list of best practices, we wanted to provide a collection of really good questions. A toolkit also potentially intervenes in the educational process, both of current and new practitioners. So we were thinking that that would be a high impact point of intervention also. The base of the toolkit will be an expanding collection of case studies. Again, a format that we chose quite carefully, a little more on that later. So that's an overview of our goal. So here is the traditional project process in bullet point format. And in designing this project, we wanted to recognize that while we have some expertise, we certainly don't have it all. The grant team consists of four white women at a research institution, research university. And we need to understand the privilege of that position. So we thought that it was essential that this project was open and participatory and that we understand our role as much as facilitators and as people that's gonna learn from everyone else that participates. So we wanted to think of mechanisms where we could encourage robust but distributed participation. So again, this is our general process. I'll just call out a few features that we're working on. So first is this idea of the core format being the case study. And so this relates to the idea of, we can call it practice, but that theory is important and so is actual work, so is practice. And that those two things inform each other and often you learn as much through the practice of your day-to-day work than you do by reading a wonderfully theoretical article. And so we wanted to relate broad philosophical concerns to what people are actually seeing in the field. Concrete examples of what people are experiencing. We also thought that the case studies would be a chance to discover work that is not being published in the formal literature or in reports. Very few people have the time and space to write a 20-page article or a 20-page report. So we envision these case studies as maybe five-ish pages and ways to capture what people are learning through their work processes. We have an email list for announcements. Sorry, so I'm skipping onto the next thing. We also tried to come up with a lot of different ways for participation, email list for announcements, Twitter for interaction, named roles for different groups. You can see our website for more on that. And we really wanted to look at the National Forum, FORA, I should say, we have two planned, as chances to get people together to give us feedback, great, not necessarily things where we are pushing out info, but really where our goal is to put things in front of really wonderful groups of people and have them work those through with us. And finally, our end state after we have this toolkit released in fall 2018 will be to partner with the DLF and educators to test its actual use, and eventually it'll be hosted on the DLF website. And we have to stop ourselves from constantly saying, and then the DLF happens and the magical things occur, because the DLF is such an involved community, but we think that'll be the eventual goal. So the first thing that we did was a robust environmental scan, again, we're thinking that it was important to understand that we don't have all the expertise here. And there's a lot of stuff, we have a Zotero library linked on our website, so I encourage you to check that out, but I wanna introduce people to a couple of ideas from that environmental scan. So the first in the spirit of a project brief to help historicize this project is Dr. Doris Hargret Clack. She usually published under Doris H. Clack. So in 1973, she does a study as part of her dissertation research, I think, on the adequacy of library of Congress subject headings and how they serve researchers in African-American studies and history. So she does this in 1973. In 1979, with her co-author Jessica Harris, she expands that work into a general study of library of Congress subject headings referencing minority groups. So here's a little bit of what they found in 1979. This was one of the sort of foundational starting points for our literature review. Clark and Harris, for example, note that until recently in 1979, Mexican-Americans would have been described as Mexicans dash dash in the United States. There was no allowable Mexican-American subdivision for library of Congress subject headings. So in other words, ethnic groups could literally never become Americans. It would always be Mexicans dash dash in the United States. Never Mexican-Americans, that's one example. They write very evocatively on the sanitization of U.S. history, for example. They talk about how in the articles writing in 1979, the phrase evacuation and relocation was used to describe the experience of Japanese internment camps. This is not evacuation and relocation. There are a lot of additional examples. I'm sure you can imagine. Harris and Clark have two wonderfully dry quotes that I wanna share. So they say to start, the subdivision dash dash discovery and exploration applied to any continent except Antarctica is decidedly Western in bias. And I'm like, mic drop ladies, this is really well put. Until 1977, when Italian-American criminals was added to the list of acceptable terms, Jewish criminals, Afro-American criminals, and Indians of North America dash dash crime shared the dubious distinction of being the only ethnic groups recognized by LC as having a crime problem. So this is again, 1979. The article ends with a lot of really thoughtful and specific suggestions on how to fix these practices. And as we all know, 1979 was almost 40 years ago and I actually don't share these so that we can look at the past and say, well, look how ignorant we were then and how we've fixed everything now. Haven't we come far? Let's congratulate ourselves. Instead, I wanted to share this from our literature review because we're making the same mistakes today. People are probably familiar with the discussion around the term illegal aliens in the Library of Congress subject headings and whether or not that's the right term. So these discussions are still happening. I also wanna make sure to be clear that I am not trying to make this the Library of Congress complaint hour. I think they operate under a lot of constraints that are hard for people outside to understand. But I don't think, when we look at this work from 1979, I don't think the right thing to take away is weren't those librarians doing things wrong? I think the right thing to take away is that it's still occurring. Go forward. So the next thing I wanna share, having given a little historical context is a little bit more on how we did the initial framing of our thinking around this concept of design for diversity. The idea of the stack was very important to us in conversations and in our initial grant planning. Felt very important to us to unpack the stack, as it were. So we sort of looked through and found examples where we thought issues of inclusivity and diversity would come up at all of these layers. So I can give you, we have a lot so I'm happy to answer more questions later. But one of I think the important ones that I really wanna mention and refer folks to is for example at the communication and interaction protocol level, Kim Kristen, I don't know if folks are familiar with her work, she works on Mukatu. Her work is particularly focused on intellectual property issues for indigenous materials and looking at what can be shared and how. And particularly when culturally sensitive materials should only be shared amongst a very particular group of people. Creative, there's a Creative Commons license in New Zealand that also discusses this in terms of Maori material. So this is work that people are doing and I would refer folks to that as an example of how these issues can play out in different parts of the stack. So opening forum, we started out with this forum to bring people together and again present a bunch of different case studies. We wanted them to be relatively short and varied and we wanted to have participants be able to take notes and give us a lot of audience feedback. One of the, I think, logistical lessons we learned that was really helpful is if you do wanna have live stream and Twitter participation, then have someone and even better pay them for doing this devoted to your Twitter stream and your online interaction. We had some wonderful grad students who did that. We also asked our advisory board to attend and give comments, so again shaped around this idea of participation. And what I really wanna do is share with everyone what we've learned so far. And this is where I have to thank the grant team again and also all the presenters at the opening forum. You should check out their stuff online. So the first thing is to forget the stack. Remember that diagram I actually spent a lot of time putting together, right? Don't completely forget the stack, but what really, we sort of reframed our thinking into the fact that the most important thing is really the planning process around each project and through each project. Rather than kind of having a deeply detailed and technical understanding of what exactly could go wrong at every layer in the stack. In other words, design also means designing a good structure for relationships. The process itself can set up a project for failure or a success. So a sub-bullet to that is that we are free to tighten up scope, right? We can focus on things like data models and representation because that's what we do well and more important is to share our project widely so that people in other fields might start to think about how to do this work. The idea of centered and unmarked was incredibly helpful. These are metaphors that came up during the forum when we were talking about systems. So for example, the African-American digital humanities team from the University of Maryland gave a great discussion on how the goal of their project is to center the black experience in black communities and how when you start meetings by reminding everyone what the goal of your project is, it actually really changes things like who is involved, things like how long you allow the process to take and things like how you sustain that process. The idea of unmarked and marked also came from a great talk by Emily Drobinski who noted the example of searching for information on women in a library catalog. If you want to find information on black women, you have to type black women. Generally, if you type just women, the assumption is actually white women and when you specify white women, it'll bring up things like Nazi organizations or white power groups. So there's this assumption that that kind of activity is this sort of weird bit of whiteness but normal whiteness is just kind of blank and unmarked. So if you want to find, again, things on white women in the catalog, you just type in women. But if you want to find things on women of color, you have to specify that. So that's sort of what is marked and unmarked in your system and that was really helpful for us to think about. There's also several of our speakers were really great on this. They talked about how it's really important to understand exactly who is benefiting from your project and the fact of the matter is Enrique Ponzelan was a great speaker on this. If you ever have a chance to see him speak or invite him, invite him, he's great. And he's in the archives field and talks about how a lot of these projects that focus on even traumatic events in the history of marginalized groups actually profit from others' pain, right? I'm here giving an academic presentation. Other people are getting academic credit for creating collections around events that are actually very painful to a group of people. So you are profiting from that and you should at least understand that. He also pointed forum attendees to a great article titled Decolonization is not a metaphor. So people may have been familiar with this, or you may have heard people talk about decolonizing the archive, decolonizing the computer stack, right? Ricky in this article pointed out that decolonization means giving land back to the people that it was taken from, right? That is what decolonization means. And I took this as a really good reminder to look at the material benefits of the projects that you're working on and asking is there a way that your project can materially benefit, right? And materially mean like money, okay? Or opportunity, materially benefit the community that you're working with. Can you provide research and time and resources on questions that that group of people have rather than questions that you have or your funder has or your researchers have, right? Can you pay people for scanning in or giving an oral history interview or adding keywords to old photos, right? We expect a lot of that labor to be free and fun. And if the work doesn't concretely benefit all of your partners, then maybe you just shouldn't do it. And I really, again, want to refer you to Jordanna McConny and Ricky's work on that too. In addition to that is this idea of reappropriation and extraction. If you remove culture and then make it unavailable to the group that created it, then again, who is that for? And so one example that one of our speakers brought up because she does work in the history of technologies used by people with disabilities is when exhibits on those technologies are in museums that themselves are not accessible by people with disabilities, right? So who is benefiting in that particular case? And I think documenting the now, I don't know if people are probably familiar with that project, handles the idea of social media extraction, I think very thoughtfully, so I encourage people to check that out. Ricky, again, also brought up a pretty common metaphor that we're seeing, which is that data is the new oil. And so Ricky asks, you hear this in the, I mean, I've seen this in articles too, that in the era of big data, data is the new oil. That's what's gonna power the economy. So Ricky quite wisely asked, well, what about wars that have been fought over oil? What happens when you pull oil out of a country for use somewhere else? What happened? Does the country holding that oil really profit and then who in that country is actually profiting, right? So he really productively pushed back against that idea of data as the new oil. So a couple more lessons that we learned that really helped us reframe our project was first the idea of redefining efficiency and optimization. And these are words that have a lot of loaded baggage, particularly in the IT and library fields. I will admit that I am as much a person that thinks about optimization as any other librarian. Like in the morning, I have my very specific routine of tasks, because that's how they all overlap. And I know I'm saving the most time. Wake up the baby, start the tea water, feed baby, right? So there's a particular optimal way that I want all of my mornings to go. And so generally when we say efficient or optimal, we are thinking the fastest, the most systematic, the one that allows for the least variability. But what if you design your project and it's optimized for building better relationships? What if it's optimized to benefit the external community that you're working with? And that looks very different. Related to that is this idea of an ethic of pace comes from Moia Bailey, who's another one of our marvelous presenters. And she really talked about how giving partnerships the space and time that they need is an ethical issue. And this is really important when you are dealing with, again, people from marginalized groups. It is an ethical issue. So I know a lot of leaders and administrators are probably in this room and probably have had a lot of pressure to work with outside community groups that are never well-defined, right? It's just work with someone outside in the community. And I think if we are going to start doing that, then we need to accept that projects maybe need to be smaller and slower. And I'm sure that that would be a really popular message to take back to your campus. I realize, right, saying our projects needs to start smaller and take longer is not necessarily a popular phrase in higher ed right now. But there is an ethical dimension to that, right? I think assuming that project members will change is really important in terms of all things, documentation. If you are relying on community members to do various things, they are probably doing it through volunteer time. And so they may say, you know what, I'm too busy. And you need to assume that a staff is changeable. You may need to assume that a project will go dormant for a little bit while you look for more funding. Or again, people get busy with their own lives. So part of that for, I think, administrators is to allow your staff time to actually do documentation. It kind of goes back to the ethic of pace. The last thing I'd really like to unpack is that we can start to ask more from commercial systems. And this was a really big area where this forum helped change our thinking. When we heard from several of our museum colleagues, and they basically would make the point, although much more elegantly and gracefully, but they would kind of say to us, yeah, it must be really nice to work at a big institution that can design its own repository. That's great. And what they reminded us was that the bulk of cultural heritage material in the US is actually at medium-sized and small institutions. And those institutions are never going to rule their own repository. What they are doing is using pre-made vendor systems. So that really helped give us additional focus and say, how can our toolkit help decision makers, people with purchasing power, ask better questions of these vendors in terms of saying, does this system have the ability to create culturally appropriate user permissions, or customize metadata fields, or customize displays based on cultural needs? And so that's where we felt like, if there's any way, we can start to sort of put pressure in the marketplace there. That would be a helpful outcome. So next steps are that we are still collecting case studies. So if you are in any way interested in working with us and submitting a case study, I would love to hear from you. And what I want to end with is this particular quote, which is one of my favorites. It's from Barry Lopez, who was a nature writer, traveling with field biologists. And I think sums up really what I would call the economy of attention, right? The attention itself is a political act. So for example, think of the fact that Black Lives Matter activists and other activists have shown us that there is no good way to track police violence because there is no national data or data base collected on police violence. So basically, that data has not mattered to anyone. And I love Lopez's quote here, particularly the last phrase, which I'll end with, which is one of the most inspiring to me, so you can take it or leave it, but the idea that as you are watching phenomenon, particularly in the wild, data always loses something, right? Data is always a lossy progress. And so he notes that there's something critical in the biology of large predators, the range of capability. No matter how long you watch, you will not see all that it can do. So I ran a little long. I apologize for that, but I am happy to take questions. And I'm happy to take some offline, too. I don't want to make the next group late. Thank you very much.