 Cliff Lynch, I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, and I'll be introducing and moderating this session. You've reached the final session of the plenary days of the CNI Spring 2021 virtual member meeting. We will be doing one more brief session in about 90 minutes, which is really just to bring the meeting to a close. Thank a few folks and things like that. But this will be a very fitting, I think, conclusion to the meeting, because it really does, as so many of the other plenary day sessions, look to the future. And I think that's the right way to be drawing the meeting to a close. So a couple of things before we get to the panel. This session is being recorded as have all the other sessions for the spring virtual meeting. They will be publicly available after the meeting concludes. You have a chat box and a Q&A tool, and I would invite you to use both of those as the session proceeds if you want to make comments or ask questions. We're going to hear from each of our four speakers, and then I will moderate a Q&A session, and you can address questions either to the entire panel or to a specific speaker or speakers. There is also closed captioning. Please feel free to use that if it's helpful. I think those are all the mechanical things I wanted to say. So let me introduce this panel just briefly. CNI has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the Council on Library and Information Resources Clear Fellows program for many years. Clear selects and funds a group of fellows, a cohort, every year or so. And they have often come together in conjunction with our meetings, particularly our spring meeting, and have always been welcome guests at our meetings when they took place in person. From my perspective, the Clear Fellows are a really important program that brings a whole set of diverse expertise, a few points and talents into our institutions where they do wonderful, creative, and often very unusual work for the period of their fellowships. They often then go on to do other fascinating things. And many of them continue to be engaged with libraries, with archives, special collections, technology in the service of research and teaching and learning in fascinating ways. And many of them have become longstanding members of our community. Now, I know that our member representatives at CNI have always enjoyed the opportunity to get to know the Clear Fellows, the current cohort, every year at the meetings that we held when they were held in person. The Clear Fellows often were very engaged at sessions. They would ask incisive questions and make insightful comments. And people would have an opportunity to get to know them a little bit at the social events. Then we went virtual. And when we went virtual as a consequence of the pandemic, while many of the sort of content related and programming related parts of our meetings continued, so much of the interaction, the community building, the getting to know people got lost. That's really, really hard to do in the virtual environment. We don't seem to, as a society, have mastered that yet. So starting with the full 2020 CNI meeting, I had been growing very concerned that we had cohorts of Clear Fellows that were just getting lost to our community, that we didn't have an opportunity to get to know. And I suspect that those Clear Fellows faced a difficult time as well, because so much of the process and the opportunity of being a Clear Fellow is getting to interact and build that community and those connections. So I started convening panels in December of about four or five Clear Fellows drawn from recent cadres. And we did one focusing on the 2019-2020 Fellows in December. This time, we've also brought some members of the most current cohort to join us, and we're certainly going to continue doing this as long as the Clear Fellows program continues and as long as we're virtual. I'm not sure how we're going to handle this if we get back in person in the fall and beyond, but we certainly look forward to continuing to welcome the Clear Fellows into the CNI community. So with that introduction, I have four wonderful Clear Fellows to introduce you to today. And I've invited each of them to say a little bit about themselves, their background, their work, and also their current concerns and thoughts about the environment we're in. And I've asked each of the panelists to talk for around 10 or 11 minutes. And then, as I said, we'll open it up for some questions from the audience. And for want of any better organizing principle, I'm just going to take them in alphabetical order. And I'm going to turn it over to our first panelist today, Portia Hopkins. Thank you, Dr. Lynch. And thank you, members of CNI, for this opportunity to speak to you today about the exciting work I'm doing at Circle, the Center for Engaged Research and Learning and the Fondren Library at Rice University. My name is Portia Hopkins, and I'm the CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Research Associate in Data Curation for African-American Studies. To give you a little background about me, my training in American Studies and Historic Preservation from the University of Alabama and the University of Maryland College Park, as well as my experience in university special collections and working at the National Archives in Washington, DC, prepared me for this fellowship. But the work that I'm privileged to do now to collaborate and lead at Rice University has transformed my scholarship in just one short year. And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about those experiences today and let you know how COVID has also been a part of that narrative. And Diane, if you could put the visual app. Be so helpful. Thank you. So what you're seeing here are two images. The two photos you see offer a snapshot into the vastly different African-American experiences that I'm studying in Fort Bend and Harris counties, both in Houston, Texas. They're captured just 50 years and 50 miles apart. And while one reflects the depths of despair, the other reflects the promise of a bright future through home ownership and community building. Both images call into question issues of agency and kinship and belonging and represent the untold stories that my work seeks to reveal. The Sugarland 95 Story Map Project, as well as Project Pleasantville, are two initiatives from which I would like to share my experiences today. To give you a little bit of background, when I was awarded this fellowship, I was so excited and humbled and honored to start working with the Rice community and the community organizations that they partner with. My fellowship started July 1. And unfortunately, one of our community leaders, Mr. Reginald Moore, died just three days after I started. And so I had known Mr. Moore from other research opportunities that I had participated in in Fort Bend County, a symposium that he had put on in 2018 about convict leasing on Labor Day, and was really excited to get the opportunity to work with him again. And so the loss triggered something in me, as well as many in the Rice community and in Fort Bend County community. Moore was more than just a colleague of mine. He was also an activist who had been diligently working for 30 years, telling the story of least convicts and providing a voice for the voiceless. And Mr. Moore was one of the first people that was talking to the Texas legislature, talking to historical commissions in Fort Bend County about the bodies that were in the ground that were not marked, that were the remains of least convicts. And so after his tragic passing, Fondren Library really doubled down on honoring his legacy and his life work. We had already had a collection of his papers at the Woodson Research Center. And we were really interested in continuing to tell the stories of men and women who tirelessly worked and tragically died in the fields, as well as integrating Mr. Moore's activism and heroism into those narratives as well. And so from that, I partnered with the convict Leason Labor Project, or CLIP, as we call them, and have started working on a story mapping project. We were fortunate to be able to hire an undergraduate research fellow to assist in some of the technical aspects of this, as I am learning myself as well. And what I'm most proud of with the work that Suzanne and I have been able to do in just a few short months is reveal some of these stories. And so the image that you're seeing here on the left is from 1900, and it's from a sugar farm in Fort Bend County. And in the bottom right-hand corner, you'll see Imperial, Texas. And this is from the Imperial Sugar Farm, which is also the central prison farms convict least private industry that they worked with. What's really fascinating about the story map and why I'm so excited to be sharing this project with you is that it continues to evolve and develop. One thing that we're really excited about is pairing this story map with the Black Houston Atlas that one of the faculty members at Rice University is currently putting together. Once the project is finished, we envision it combining multimedia and photographs, documents, maps, newspaper clippings, and press releases, and deeds to tell the story of the Sugar Land 95. And this project provides such an important layer in talking about convict leasing in Texas, which was something that was incredibly prevalent. And unfortunately, something that people don't really talk that much about. Of late, we've had more discussion around it, but I can tell you going up in K-12 education in Texas, I heard nothing of the sort. The second project I want to tell you about is Project Pleasantville. This project began as a class project for two faculty members at Rice University. And they were interested in looking at environmental racism and toxicity. And so from that project, from spring 20, COVID hit, and so they had to move the operation online. Well, as most things do when we go online, it changes the scope of our project. And so I was ecstatic to get an email from my supervisor alerting me of an opportunity to work on this project Pleasantville, particularly bringing in my expertise in oral history methods and community activism. And I love this project so much. I've fallen so deeply and passionately in love with the story of Pleasantville. And I'm so honored to be the vessel that gets to help tell this story. Pleasantville is an African-American community that was founded after World War II in Houston. And it's the direct result of a need in Houston that emerged from two different shifts in Houston demography. The first is the influx of African-Americans moving from rural areas to the city between 1930 and 1950. And I have a colleague, Burnett Pruitt, who wrote a fantastic book called The Other Great Migration that kind of points to some of these things. And then the second is a need for GIs to find a home, said, for their families when they returned from Europe and from abroad. And so you think, like, these are men that fought so bravely that did not experience the same type of racism in Tokyo and in Germany that they in France as they did in Houston. And they come home to these rural parts of Houston, and they say, no way, I'm coming to the city. And so Pleasantville really emerges from those two demographic shifts. And then, of course, the GI Bill is going to help this process along. Coupled with that bill and more specifically within Pleasantville, you're going to start to see this community building that's going to occur beginning in 1948. And so the second photo is actually an ad for Pleasantville. It's dated September 10, 1950. And it demonstrates what access to opportunity looked like in the form of property ownership at a time of Jim Crow. Now, if you look a little bit closer at this, you see they have some luxuries, right? They're stormproof and solid plywood building materials where Houston it floods, we get a lot of hurricanes. So that would definitely be a draw now and even then. Those oversized still windows are going to let in that beautiful spring light and that Texas heat. But most importantly, the ways in which they're building community and property ownership is going to be central to the experiences of Pleasantville residents. And so the oral histories that I am conducting with first and second generation Pleasantville community members really get to the root of what made this community so special. And I can tell you, it has been a challenge with COVID because on the one hand, we lose something when we're not in person. And I can definitely attest to that as recent as Tuesday when I got to do my first in-person interview. And I was just so humbled to be invited to Mr. Moran's home and to be able to do this interview with him, socially distanced of course, but face to face. I wanted to also point you to just briefly, because I know I'm going to run out of time, that the other thing that happens in COVID is that we start to chip away at the communities that we built. And the thing that I really love about Rice is they are intentional about continuing to build community, despite the obstacles that we face with COVID. I'm part of a community activist and community archives reading group. I've been able to sit in on instructors, lectures, and help graduate students revise some of their chapters. I've had so many amazing opportunities that were allotted and afforded to me because of the digital world. And so there are plenty of disadvantages. I do not want to say the digital world is all amazing. But there are some advantages to that. And I think as scholars, we have to continue to find new ways to push our scholarship forward and find new ways to ensure that we're not losing that collaborative piece. Because one of the best things about being a researcher is being able to create new knowledge from the sources that we find. And the last little piece, I'm currently working with social studies coordinators for Houston ISD and Round Rock ISD to integrate the story map into the curricula for the convict leasing. And hopefully when Project Pleasantville gets up on its digital feats, we will be able to integrate those narratives as well. So I thank you so much for this opportunity. I hope you all stay safe and live well. Thank you so much. That was fascinating and wonderful. Luling, would you tell us about yourself and what you're doing? Sure. Thank you, Cliff. My name is Luling Huang. I got my PhD in media and communication from Temple University. I consider myself as a quantitative social scientist. My research is about belief change, studying public opinion, and also persuasion. So my dissertation compared for mathematical models that investigate the psychological processes behind people processing a very extreme message. So that is very general about my dissertation. During my time at Temple University, I got the opportunity to work as a graduate assistant at the Digital Scholarship Center at Temple University Libraries. I got the opportunity to learn and develop my skills in different methods for digital humanities and computational social science, such as text mining and also social network analysis. And also I just got more hand-on experience with the whole lifecycle of data curation, web scraping, data cleaning, and also data analysis. So those are my prior experience before I joined the CLEAR program. So right now I'm a data curation fellow in energy social sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. My position is I'm working like a bridge between the university libraries and the Scott Energy Institute at the Carnegie Mellon University. I'm going to talk about several of my projects. These are all in progress projects, because I'm still just seven months in my position. So the first project, a big research project I've been working on, is a project about energy equity. So relating back to my background in studying public opinion, I developed this project studying, measuring the public's attitudes about the inequality of electricity consumption in the US. So actually one-third of the households in the US is in the condition of energy insecurity, which basically means that people cannot afford their energy bills. So I'm teaming up with an engineering scholar at Carnegie Mellon, Professor Destiny Knack and also Eswaria Raja, the research associate at the Scott Institute. So we are collaborating together on this research project. Basically it's a choice experiment based on the behavior of economics literature that we are inferring this parameter called inequality aversion based on people's choices between different distributions of electricity consumption. So that's very generally about my research projects. Related to that project, so I've been spending a lot of time on digging into this data set called residential energy consumption survey. So this is a reliable national data set collected by the US Energy Information and Administration. And this data set includes many variables that are very important to study topics about residential energy behaviors and energy economics in the US, including energy consumption and expenditure by field type, residential building characteristics, and also household socioeconomic characteristics. So I found two challenges for the public to use the RACS data set because the government agency used the tax money to collect this data set. So I believe that any interested citizen should be able and find it accessible to analyze this data set for free. So the first challenge is that it takes some time to understand a complex survey design, especially for someone who is not a survey expert. And the second challenge is that EIA explains how to properly analyze the RACS data in SAS, but apparently SAS is a proprietary data analysis software. So my goal is to write an online tutorial in R that explain for any interested public about what a data sampling design is in a complex survey design and also give a step-by-step tutorial about how to analyze this data set in R, which is an open source tool. And the other project I've been working on is creating a LibGuy for energy social science. So the library, CMU libraries, wants to know just very general what this field is. That is called energy social sciences. And the libraries also want to provide some useful resources for the whole CMU community for both teaching and research. Another project is conducting the research data management survey and interview. So the goal of this project is to inform the data services at the CMU libraries to better understand the needs and current practices of data management by the energy experts at the SCAR Energy Institute. So I've been collecting the survey responses. And also I just finished my first interview with one of the energy experts. And the last project, this is about to help the SCAR Energy Institute to better use one of the resources provided by the library, which is called Dimensions. We can think of it as a newer, more open source parallel to a Google scholar. So the problem for the SCAR Energy Institute is that they want to track the latest scholarly information. For example, publication, the latest grants that their faculty affiliates are getting. But they have been doing this manually, keeping track of all of this data in a spreadsheet, which is time-consuming and inefficient. So I've been working on to develop first with a back-end data query with Python to query the Dimensions database with the API. And also the next step is to create a dashboard that is user-friendly for the SCAR Energy Institute staff to use so that they can track their faculty affiliates, the latest publication and grants data more easily. So a little bit more about the remote work impact. So frankly speaking, I've just been grateful that I have a job under the current type job market in academia. I would say it's just a bit like of human elements in my interaction with my colleagues. I just wanted to know more about my colleagues and build more trust. Hopefully the pandemic situation is going to improve for my second year. And also, this is my first full-time position. So many of my day-to-day work challenges are just because I'm adjusting to a new professional environment from being a grad student. I just want to thank Clear for the monthly training sessions. For example, the project management session was very helpful. The Clear mentorship program and also my Clear cohort for the support. Thank you very much. I will stop with that. Well, thank you. What a fascinating range of projects. And I do just want to note that Clear has, as I understand it, been supporting a couple of fellows specifically in this area around energy in the last year or two, which I think is a really, really interesting multidisciplinary area for them to be supporting work in. Jennifer, could I reach out to you? Absolutely. Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk to everyone today. My name is Jennifer Rass. I go by she, her pronouns. I completed my graduate studies at the College of William and Mary down in Williamsburg, Virginia. I was studying American studies with kind of an emphasis on contemporary American literature and contemporary history. And specifically, my dissertation focused on her pinketry men in New Orleans. And I'll talk more about that in a moment. But currently, I am the post-doctoral fellow for the Digital Humanities Network up at the University of Toronto. So a lot of the work I'm doing this year is split between my own research and responsibilities for the DHN, the Digital Humanities Network. So my dissertation was called Insurgents on the Bayou, Hurricane Katrina, Counterterrorism, and Literary Descent on America's Gulf Coast. And this project really examined Hurricane Katrina as a crucial moment of social, political, and cultural negotiation between developing counterterror policy in the United States and this public resistance to it. Specifically, I was exploring how post-911 governments from federal, state, local prioritized the protection of critical infrastructure. So we're talking about nuclear power plants or energy grids, banking systems. So they prioritize this critical infrastructure and counterterror preparedness over more pressing social issues like climate change or the erosion of wetlands or poverty. So in the post-Katrina kind of environment, the way that this emphasis on counterterrorism intersected with American racism was to reinvigorate the anti-black, anti-arrow racism that we were seeing throughout American history. And it kind of coalesced at this moment. So in the militarization of New Orleans, we saw afterwards post-Katrina authors and filmmakers were really exposing and condemning this exercise of counterterror rhetoric and also practice by connecting the storm to both domestic apparatuses of slavery and mass incarceration, but then also drawing these transnational linkages to international systems of detention overseas occupation. So alongside this written project, I designed a digital humanities component that really tried to visualize the more theoretical arguments that I was making. So I'm going to drop into chat right now a link to the mapping website that I created. I used HTML and Python and also LeafletJS to create kind of this multi-layered map that took cross-referenced flood depth and race and class demographics with these security checkpoints that were installed in post-Katrina New Orleans so that we could see very clearly, very easily, not only the historic systems of environmental racism where African-Americans were placed on lower ground while white neighborhoods were on higher ground, but also this intersection between race and militarization. Quite often, the bulk of these security checkpoints would be distributed in a way that protected white spaces of capital like the French Quarter. So again, by integrating these multiple spatial analyses into one visualization, the project tried to clarify how strands of American racism and disaster response and counterterrorism were manifesting and overlapping in New Orleans at the time of the storm. So I give this kind of background to what my doctoral research was because my research in this post-doc position really builds on that. So I was quite disturbed by what I was finding about the domestic uses of counterterrorism against racialized populations. And then under the last administration, it really seemed to accelerate and become much more visible. This use of rhetoric that described protesters as terrorists, the use of active duty military or private contractors to shut down protests. So my current research project excavates this integration of war on terror military tactics into policing, immigration, and prosecution between Hurricane Katrina where I left off and the present day. I'm specifically looking at the use of private security contractors, which in more everyday terms, they're mercenaries. So they're hired to do this kind of security work outside of the US military complex. So I'm focused on that and also drone surveillance and how these components have infiltrated modes of domestic governance and state institutions. So I've identified three key areas that I want to focus on. One is disaster response, again, because we're seeing the same repetition of what we saw during Katrina in New Orleans in post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico. So again, we see this influx of private security contractors coming into guard spaces of capital to guard water supplies to the detriment of the community there, and particularly in racialized terms. I'm also honing in on protests in the United States, specifically the Nodakal protests and Standing Wrap, and the Black Lives Matter protests, especially in Portland, where the use of private security contractors became like this flashpoint. What's particularly disturbing about the Standing Wrap protests is we're seeing kind of this, the roles of private contractors are bleeding across what we would consider like legal boundaries. So the state prosecutors and the Dakotas were hiring private security contractors to conduct surveillance to create files on protesters that the prosecutors could then use to lodge cases against them. So we're seeing what was a paramilitary system. Now it has infiltrated policing, and it is setting up shop in the execution and legal realm. And finally, I'll be looking at immigration, because under the Trump administration, private security contractors were picking up unaccompanied minors and then transporting them to hotels in what NPR described as a shadow immigration system, and then immediately deporting them across the border. So these children never entered or encountered anyone who represented the official immigration system. So we're really seeing something that didn't exist before 1996 proliferate across all of these different milios and environments. So again, this research is going to take shape in a textual form, but it's ultimately going to be designed to be a digital project that is open to the public and is very reader friendly. I'm going to use Esri's story maps to create this broad view of North America with all of the different points where we see private security contractors being deployed. And then each pin will take you down into a specific project for each location, so one for Portland, one for Standing Rock, one for Puerto Rico, so that there will be multiple digital projects that ultimately tell this narrative about public resistance to the deployment of private security contractors. So that's my research. But alongside that, my work for the Digital Humanities Network really draws on those skills and the ability to reach out to other DH scholars, both in Canada and the United States. So one of the projects that I've been involved with this year is trying to get a critical digital humanities initiative started at the University of Toronto. And so what critical DH is, is that part of digital humanities that really focuses on anti-racism, feminism, queer theory, and anti-colonialism. So it kind of moves away from the white, Eurocentric kind of text analysis and really emphasizes voices from the margins and voices from racialized communities. So we're trying to get that up and running. I worked on a grant proposal to get funding for the next three years for that project. And I'm happy to say that we were funded, so it's moving ahead. But now the task is to kind of build that infrastructure behind the initiative to get a steering committee up, to get calls for new positions and new funding out to people. And finally, the other major project that I've been tasked with is creating these monthly, what they're called, is Lightning launches. And so they're an hour, hour and 15 minutes where we have a panel very much like this and organized around a digital humanities theme where researchers can explain their research and discuss with the audience, discuss with each other. Typically, these had in the past been held in person. And of course, there would be lunch, right? So that has gone away with COVID, which is very sad. But the one positive side is that in opening up on Zoom, we've gotten people from all over the world, I mean Switzerland, the UK, Germany, and East to West Coast of Canada and the United States. So we've had really well-attended sessions on archiving black history and culture or indigenous data studies. So it's been really fruitful and very heartening to see how many people are interested in this kind of critical DH term. But again, building off of what Luling was saying, it's very hard to create that kind of interpersonal connection. I mean, people are there, it's wonderful to see, you have an opportunity to network. But once you exit the Zoom meeting, it's anybody's guess if that kind of connection will continue. And I think there's a lot of invisible labor behind that in reaching out and finding the time or remembering to reach out to someone you met that isn't acknowledged. I mean, a lot of emphasis has gone into saying that the digital world provides all these new networking opportunities, but there is an effort and a labor that's involved in that that's unacknowledged. And so finally, I would just like to close saying, some of my concerns, again, like Luling, I am so grateful and so privileged to have a job this year. And unlike most of the queer fellows, my position will end in June. So I am back out on the job market, but it's concerning. Even before the pandemic, the job market was tight. And graduating, you kind of approach it with this optimism that comes with youth, but also a healthy dose of fear driven by thoughts of unemployment and financial situation that comes with that. And I have no firm evidence of this, but it seems like the kind of backup positions that an academic could turn to, the so-called ALT Act positions have also dried up because they're tied to the university and state and nonprofit funding. So approaching the job market again, it's terrifying a little bit. There is some good news, though. I have heard reports that higher increases are lifting in some areas, but I'm still not optimistic that we'll see the same or a comparable level of opportunity to what was even available a year ago. So I think I'll end with that. Thank you again so much for the opportunity to talk today. I'm really looking forward to any questions in the Q&A. Well, thank you, Jennifer. And finally, I'd like to turn to Sinatra to hear about her work. Sure, thanks. So a little bit about my background. I attended Florida International University down in Miami. So I got to go to the beach and do homework while I was in graduate school, which was wonderful. I did the Global and Sociocultural Studies with the Anthropology Track. My department had Anthropology, Sociology, and Geography in it. And so they decided to give us a very fancy name that we have to translate every time we explain. I also got a graduate certificate in African and African Diaspora Studies. And so I see someone in the chat also went to FIU. Yes, Golden Panthers. And my dissertation looked at the way that Black Greek letter organizations are representations of the various ways to perform Black middle class identities. And so I went to Atlanta Green Picnic, which is a festival that happened past tense every year in June. I don't know if they're going to come back, I hope so. And members of these Black fraternity disabilities just descend on Atlanta for about a week or so. We have all these different performances and things. And so I got to be a part of my dissertation. I was on the step team for my sorority as well. And in the pilot study and the actual dissertation year, which stress, that's all I can say. And so I was looking at the different tropes that are available to us as Black Greeks and the way that we kind of pull from them for different purposes at different moments. After that, I started working at the Prince George's African American Museum and Cultural Center in North Brentwood, Maryland. And I also have done some work with the Banneker Douglas Museum in Annapolis, Maryland. So I was firmly planted in the museum world, obviously. And so kind of transitioning into a different area of glam with this postdoc. Now I am at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Library and Archives and the Temple University Library's Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, so many long, long, long titles. And my title is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American Studies. So there are a couple of different projects I'm working on with these institutions. One is a WikiData project where I'm researching missing information from the records of Black artists that are in PMA's collection. And then soon I'll be adding on the Charles L. Blocks and Afro American Collection at Temple University as well. So I'm focusing specifically on artists who were born in Philadelphia or lived and worked in Philadelphia. And because of some the issues with the gender distribution of these artists, I've also decided to focus on all of the Black female artists in PMA's collection at the moment because they just, I feel like they need a little bit more of disability. And so I'll be able to do some data visualizations with that work. And we were able to host a WikiData editathon that was combined with both institutions and of course, over Zoom, which I think was a challenge and an opportunity. And then additionally, I am doing some 3D modeling. My goal is to create an interactive virtual reality exhibition experience. I have made a 3D model, I haven't completely made it, I'm still working on furniture, but I've made a 3D model of Harriet's Bookshop which is a Black woman-owned bookstore in Fishtown in Philadelphia. And so eventually I'll be able to create 3D models of books and artifacts that are in the Blockson Collection, PMA's collection and put those into the space. And her space already in real life operates kind of like a gallery, it's beautiful inside and she changes up the way that everything is situated in there. It's just amazing. And so I'll just be kind of switching out what she has in there to focus a little bit more on local artists and specifically those that are in those collections. And soon I'll be starting an AR project where we'll be doing some photogrammetry of black, of sculptures that focus on black folks in Philadelphia. I found a list on the Smithsonian's website of 22, I believe. And so there are a few of us at Temple that would be able to work on that. So with COVID, there have been a few challenges, of course. One is that as soon as I was about to start 3D modeling archival objects from the Blockson Collection, Philadelphia went into its late fall lockdown right before Thanksgiving. So I had to cancel that and now I've just kind of reprioritized tasks that don't require any contact with anyone else. So I've been learning blender and researching artists and doing a lot of professional development on my own, which is kind of isolating. And in the same vein, I'm also unable to become firmly planted in these institutions. So I started my interview process during the pandemic. I haven't met most of my colleagues in person. I had to regroup once I wasn't able to do the 3D modeling in person. And so I'm on some committees that are cross-departmental at PMA and I'm in some working groups at Temple. So I get to work with specific folks a lot, but there's still that lack of like being in the building. I don't know how to get to either place without a GPS still. It's very frustrating. But there have been some opportunities. I've got a lot of technology in my home now that I've gotten from Temple and PMA. I've got my own laptop desktop plus two additional laptops, one for each institution. I've got a VR headset. I was able to do a photogrammetry training on Zoom. And like I said before, I'm in those working groups. So anytime I come across an issue like I recently did, I'm able to take that to the working group and kind of get that figured out. And then I also used YouTube to learn how to use Blender and pretty much created all of these 3D models with the help of the internet. I'm also extremely grateful to the Mellon Foundation who extended the fellowship for those of us who are on the African-American studies track. So we have an additional two years. And I just feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders as a result of that. And then also the access to virtual meetings, trainings, courses, all of that. I've done a lot of speaking opportunities like this one. We did our wiki data editathon. I've taken some coding classes. And I also just yesterday took the final course for my digital archive specialist certificate through the Society of American Archivists. And now I've got to study for the comprehensive exam, which is fun because I haven't taken a test in such a long time. So this will be an interesting experience. I've also got some projects outside of those main projects that are associated with my fellowship. One is that I am a co-interviewer along with Portia on the creating access to HBCU Library Alliance Archives, Needs Capacity and Technical Planning Project through a partnership between CLEAR and the HBCU Library Alliance. And I'm gonna drop a link to that in the chat so you can learn more about that. I'm also the second editor on CLEAR's Collaborative Futures Project where we are editing, I won't call them writings because some of them may not necessarily just be like a traditional journal article, but projects that others are doing collaboratively around our theme of a third library as possible. So look for that, I can pick at the end of the year. And then I'm also wrapping up a project called Mapping Racism that I've been doing with the Highest Build Community Development Corporation. And so I am historically contextualizing racially restrictive deed covenants in the property titles of homes in Highestville, Maryland. And a lot of these covenants are at the individual and subdivision level. And so we've been researching the folks who were responsible for putting that language in there and how that feeds into the larger FHA project of segregation or residential segregation. And then eventually the Highest Build CDC is looking to figure out how to remove that language because right now it's unconstitutional, but you never know. So they wanna just kind of figure out what would the process be to remove that? And so this is kind of a part of the larger project. And lastly, I am, Temple is a part of the leading mentorship project that Drexel is hosting. And so we'll be able to get a early career library and something like that to work with me on the WikiData project to get more information on those records and start doing the data visualizations about local black artists. And I think that's about it. Thank you so much. That's wonderful, by the way, that you've got that connection there to the leading project. We've been following that work and its predecessor project at CNI for some time. Those were wonderful, thank you all. We have here some extraordinary people doing extraordinary work. We have a comment in asking each of you if you could share a link in the chat or tell us where you're gonna be presenting or publishing your work in the near future so that people can find out more about your work and follow it. So I'd be very grateful if you'd pop something in the chat to help our attendees with that. Let me open this up for questions from our attendees. And there've been a couple of wonderful points raised in the chat. I'll just mention one from Gina Sessing where she points out that while the job situation is scary, there's also a sort of a generational change that's in part been triggered by or expedited by the pandemic with a generation of people retiring in IT and libraries and that may open up some additional opportunities in the near future. And that's I think an important observation. But let me invite other questions from our attendees. Please use either the Q&A tool or the chat. Okay, well, hearing none right now, I'm gonna ask one very quick question. Well, our panelists put a few links and addresses and things of that nature into the chat so that you can follow some of their work. So at the risk of jinxing short term job searches, I'm always curious with clear fellows, where do you see yourself ending up five or seven years out? What sort of a thing in an ideal world do you see yourself doing? Just jump in. Well, I'm so glad you asked that. The first thing would be employed. I would like to be gangfully employed with benefits. That would be very helpful. But also this opportunity has really opened my eyes to different ways of doing it. I think the opportunity has really opened my eyes to different ways that I can apply my PhD, both in private and the public sector. And so, and I just, my love of archives and I'm a book nerd. So, you know, I would, I would love to end up in a special collection. I would love to continue my work with community organizations and helping them with their archival process and historic preservation processes, but mainly like employed, like that would just be fantastic. Building off of employed, I've thought a lot about what type of institution I would want to work with. Prior to working with PMA and temple, I was at a very small black museum. And so now I'm at kind of the exact opposite of that. And I, it's, it's been a very interesting journey as they go on this diversity, equity, inclusion and access thing where we've got an office and all of that. So I think I do kind of miss working in black institutions. And I also often think about how the, what I'm doing could be shared a little bit more broadly with those smaller institutions that don't have maybe the funding or the staffing or anything like that to do these types of projects. So I'd like to eventually find myself back there, but I am open for now because as Portia said, I would like to be gainfully employed with benefits. Yeah, if I can just jump in. I also would like to be employed with benefits. But I second Portia saying that, you know, this fellowship has really opened my eyes to the different possibilities. You know, going through a PhD program, you're, you know, kind of construing a, you know, I'll get a tenure track job, but I would also love to, you know, run a DH lab or work with, you know, data librarians and DH is spread all over the university, like it's in history and English and library. So like, who knows. But also, I really want to do something. I was feeling this, this was a continual conversation during my grant program, because when my cohort started, you know, the police had just murdered Michael Brown. And this was a constant. Being going through the, the program. Were these police shootings. And so I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was feeling this was a continual conversation during my grant program because when my cohort started, you know, the police had just murdered Michael Brown. So I was, I was, I was worried over what happened to these police shootings. And so I don't want to be in every tower where I can't engage with what's happening particularly, you know, around my research, it's not enough for me to just write it. Even if it's, you know, for the public and for academia. So working in a nonprofit or some sort of think tank where there's you know, activism and advocacy or, or policy shaping policy. something that turns your research into something actionable and fulfilling I think would also be super gratifying to me to be involved with. Yeah I just want to echoing all of the above and all of you what you just said and also definitely I'm expecting myself in maybe a academia setting I would be extremely lucky and privileged to be maybe a tenure track position teaching and doing research that would be fantastic but also enjoy working at a library setting just generally constantly learning and solving problems I think that's what's driving me forward then and also echoing a point from Jennifer that I would just like to do more research projects that are more have more practical implications when I think think back about my dissertation it's been a challenge for a general audience to understand what I've been doing so yeah that's why I propose this more practical research that has important policy implications about studying energy inequality so yeah so those are my thoughts about that question. Those are fascinating responses I thank you for them we are at time I just want to mention that we will extract links from the the chat here and be sure they go on the session page so that people can can also connect up with your your work because when we put the video of this out for the public we won't it won't have the chat in it it'll just have the the video so we'll get these onto the onto the session page thank you we're past time but I just want to take one more minute to thank you all for sharing this wonderful work with us and I really hope to have an opportunity at some point in the future perhaps in December to welcome me all in person to one of our CNI meetings so thank you again thank every thank you all for joining us and we will be doing the the meeting close in about 25 minutes see some of you there thanks thank you that was just great many many thanks that was fabulous thanks for the opportunity it's been fun terrific really really wonderful thank you so much for coming thank you for inviting us yes thank you hey cohort we did awesome yes you did and I see jody is here with us and thank you jody for your help in making all this happen as always hi jody all right well have a really good one and thanks again please reach out if I can be of any help to any of you please stay in touch okay take care everyone bye bye