 Welcome, everybody to the fall CNI virtual member meeting. I'm delighted you're here with us today. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI. Just a couple of quick things about the session mechanically and before I introduce our speakers. There is a chat stream and you're welcome to introduce yourself and make comments as we go along in the chat screen. There is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen, which you can be used, which you can use to put in questions at any time. After our speakers have completed their presentation, Diane Goldenberg Hart will beam in and she will moderate the Q&A session at the end. Close captioning is available if you'd like to turn it on. And I believe that that is all of the mechanical things that I wanted to mention. So let me just introduce our speakers and this topic a little bit. We have two speakers today with us from Emory University, Wayne Morse from the Center for Digital Scholarship, and David Altus, who is a emeritus faculty member. And I think it's particularly great to see the Digital Scholarship Center engaged in this because this is exactly the kind of thing that I think is so critical that Digital Scholarship Centers can bring in terms of thinking about sustainability models and how to support and sustain effort. Now, as a very quick introduction to the topic, what we have here is a fantastic resource, this Slave Voyagers collection of data that has been painstakingly put together by a group of scholars. I believe it has received funding from various sources as part of the support of its creation. But like many of these critical community humanities resources, it reaches a point where it needs a model to sustain it. And this is a challenge that, you know, key humanistic resources have encountered again and again and again in Digital Scholarship. Lots of things have been tried with very mixed experience. And what we are going to hear about today besides, I believe, a bit about the resource itself is a slightly different strategy, which is still as Wayne and David tell me very much of work in progress, but may point us towards some very important pathways going forward. So let me welcome Wayne and David. Thanks for joining us and over to you, Wayne. Thank you, Cliff. And thanks for letting us come and be part of CNI again. Today, as Cliff was saying, we're going to talk about this model that we are putting together, the consortium model for slave voyages, which is a tremendous resource. One of, I think, as far as our center is concerned, it's very unique in several ways, which we're going to talk about a little bit later in the presentation. But I thought we'd talk about a little bit about the current environment for which it's hosted some history of the site and kind of where we are. And David will provide that. And then we can jump into the ideas that we're really driving the consortium and then where we are and some other factors there. So a little bit about where it's currently being hosted and the partnerships are with the Emory Center for Digital Resources. We are 13 FTEs and about 25, excuse me, graduate students with expertise ranging from GIS to data analysis, to text analysis, to documentary filmmaking, to XR. So typical, almost I'd say typical of a lot of other digital scholarship centers. This is the snapshot of the work that our team has done over the past two years pre-COVID. And you can see in the projects and media account, we have multiple projects that we partnered on. I would argue that slave voyages is unique in many ways. And we're going to go, as I said, we'll go into those, but it's really in some ways it follows some of the basic elements of many of the other projects, but in other ways it's very, very different. And hence, driving us to this new model. But let's back up first and start with the history of the site and actually kind of its origins and where it came from. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Altus. Thank you. Thank you very much. Very quickly, I think this started back in the 50s when there was discussion about the size of the slave trade and Tilt Curtin, a well-known historian, tackled the subject and published a book in 1969. And I was a very young graduate student at the time. I wrote to this famous man asking about some of his data. And lo and behold, he sent me 2,313 IBM punch cards, which was the beginning of the, in a sense, digitization process. So next, very quickly, we found that slave trade was so vast we had to expand our team. And these were the original four scholars. Okay, go on. So the project got major funding beginning of 1990s. And the aim at that point was to produce a CD-ROM. They were retailing at the time for, I think, $1,500, $2,000 each. And by the time we had the collection in fit state, I think the price had dropped to $200, which is what the CD-ROM so forth. At that point we had 27,000 voyages, something like 200 variables, and the input already of scholars from around the Atlantic world and beyond. The response has been tremendous in terms of people giving up that data to us. Okay, go on. So by the time the CD-ROM came out, it was already obsolete, in a sense, because the internet was going. And we then switched to building this first website. And it went live in December 2008 at Emory. By that time, the voyage count had gone up from 27,000 to 34,000. And it provided a number of features, which helped people analyze the data, and was received pretty well, I think, at the beginning. But of course anything on the internet has to change or it dies. And we've been spending the last 12 years, actually, on a treadmill of funding, not just for the content, of course, but because of the technology, which has moved continually. Okay. A side product was Atlas of the Slave Trade, which we were able to actually do things which you can't get on the website. And it's quite likely, given what happens on the web nowadays, that this might be the single lasting feature of the whole project. Because it's clear that from what I've seen, that hard copy really has better prospects of survival. And it's hard to accept in our environment, but unless we get a sustainable model going, that's the way it is. So this book may well have more importance than it would seem at first sight. Okay. So one of the things we had to do, of course, was recode the whole site. But in doing that, it quickly became apparent that we could add other features, especially the time lapse, which is indicated in the bottom right, but also several videos, one of which has proved enormously successful. I think it counts up to 150,000 views, or thereabouts. And we are, in fact, expanding that concept by building a new and I think more compelling video, which we hope to have ready by next year. So at this point, we're up to 36,000 voyages and 274 variables, which makes for a great deal of complexity. Only 74 of the variables are actually shown on the site. But of course the site offers its open access and it offers download capabilities for all the data. And one of the encouraging things is the extent of the access that's being used. Okay, Wayne, you should take over, I think. That's great. Thank you, sir. As David was just mentioning, one of the unique, even though the site aligns with our center's mission of public scholarship, it is unique in the fact that it does, again, as David said, allow for the data to be downloaded, which is similar to many other projects, but it does have the capability to manipulate and analyze the data, build into the site itself. And the sheer amount of data and the number of ways that you can look at it really makes this unique, as far as our portfolio, and I would argue as far as almost any other digital humanities project of scale. And renewable, I forgot to add that. In other words, we are adding data continually. Yes. And that's just another one of the factors that go into it. And largely, I believe a lot of the user data is returning within the K-12 world, where people may not have either the proficiency or the opportunity to download R and know how to manipulate it, or SAS or SPSS or any other type of page. So there are some barriers to that that the site breaks through. And it's critical, we feel it's critical to maintain that functionality, because A, it's so highly used, and B, it's so unique, and draws in some non-traditional scholars, which I don't believe otherwise would be able to interact with the data. Moving on to some other unique factors, we talked already about the web interface, the size of the data. Given the subject matter and where it's from, David and his team felt that multi-languages was critical after the initial rollout because of the large population of enslaved people from different worlds and the people wanting to do research on those. So that was made a priority, which is not similar to many of our other projects. As David also mentioned, there's continuing scholarship happening. And that's not unique again to our other projects, but the sheer scale and size of this one introduces some unique complexities, which we haven't had to handle. And also, as far as we've been going with this particular project at Emory, we've had some key leadership position changes. We've had a new provost, and the provost left. We're now hiring a new provost. We have a new president in place, and the provost office has been one of the major supporters of this, in addition to the College of Language of Arts and Sciences. So we had to navigate that as well. So the site was until just recently on premise. And some of the things that we had to incorporate into that architecture, if you will, was this organic growth. David and his team again of scholars are getting granting opportunities to add the visualizations, updating the timelines, adding new data, bringing in large datasets. So this is continual. And again, that's not unlike other projects. It's just different because of the size of this one. The code is everyone knows who's out there trying to make these things continue and do the care and feeding for projects like this in the humanities and probably other areas, the evolution of code, it marches on. You have to keep up with it. We have critical partnerships to make that happen within our library and within our IT organizations. Just for the operation of the site, there are some unique network demands because it doesn't traditionally follow some of the other rises and falls of demands because of K-12 and because of the worldwide visibility of this site and use of this site. So that introduced some interesting twists and turns for our on-premise installation. And also making sure the scholars have access and given that the scholars are distributed all over the globe, make sure that they have VPN, they can get in, they can make updates to the data, they can get through firewalls, we have pages designed that they can do updates and we can go and they can add it to the sites. So that was all another piece of our on-premise installation as well as as far as I'm concerned in managing a digital scholarship center, there was a rather substantial piece of our overall resources dedicated to this and I would argue rightly so, but still when you go to look at the breadth and how many new projects you can bring on and what all you can do, you've already have a lot of your resources dedicated towards this immense, important project. So that brings you, you know, dials down the amount of resources you can apply to other initiatives. There are multiple collaborators and contributors to this. As David mentioned and showed in some of the history of the site, historians and scholars from all around the globe continue to take part in this. We have code developers, sets of developers both here in the United States at Emory in Atlanta and also in Brazil that have been part of the project from almost, from the get-go, but at least many, many years. We have UIX specialists both at here and in Brazil now, systems engineers that we share with central IT and that we also have as part of our staff and the data management, our partnership with them, the data management librarians and other pieces of the library for metadata and such have been critical too. So there's lots of moving parts. Again, I would say not unlike other projects, but because of the sheer size of this and the complexity, I would argue that these are unique to this project. We mentioned funding and some of the challenges that are there and probably gonna be continuing, I think, right David? I think for these to get funding. David and his team have been hard at work to get a wonderful support from the NEH and others. As you can see here on some of them are listed on this page in order to maintain so that Emory doesn't have to carry not only the burden of making sure the site runs, but also adding to it and updating it. So these amount of partners on the financial side is critical to making that continue, we would argue. So we come to the consortium idea, the idea of having members, making sure that it's broader than just a handful of folks, move from a project team to a full governance structure and by that I mean, as David again started to talk about or talked about the history, a small group of researchers doing wonderful work and then it grows and grows organically and then it becomes something that really needs to be sustained and have a full governance structure. We have to allow external funding opportunities to happen so that the members of the consortium can help support. We have to come up with some type of idea around sustainable hosting and we have to operationalize the whole site. So and it's not quite operational, I would argue like in the PeopleSoft sense, but it is more than just kind of organic grown digital scholarship project. It really has to have some more structure than that for it to be able to succeed with this new model. So here's a little more detail about the components and some of the components. Right now as it stands, because it is, as Cliff said, it is still in process. We're looking at three years of membership and we're also asking for dues to be collected in exchange if the members can have say and what happens with the sites and with the site and help direct its development. We are asking to have a single host of the site and for a six year period because of some of the challenges with moving that large a site from one place to another. The host would have the responsibility to maintain and make sure that the site is up and running, that there's analytical data captured about the site and that it maintains an open access environment to make sure that it continue on the path that it's been put. And in addition, the host institution would wave their fees for that while they're the host because of the cost involved in maintaining it. But they would also receive some funding from the institutional dues to pay for the care and feeding wherever that is. And also they'd be able to have soft funding so the individual institution members would be able to write grants and still bring them in as long as it goes through the governance structure to be added to the site. So some of our challenges so far, at least that I feel I'm not going to speak for David, but some of the challenges that I feel are around this, the movement from like a primary scholar or a primary scholarship team to a larger team of scholars and really putting some of these operational and organizational structures in place. And it is really a change management process, I would argue. And one that really, as far as I've observed, and again, I'm not one of the scholars, but I'm there watching everything move ahead. It's moving forward in incremental steps, but it's not just where you can flip the switch and all of a sudden it turns into what its future self is going to be. There are considerations for various types of institutions to join, not just higher ed head institutions, perhaps some museums or others. And we were talking before we started the presentation today that we can't divulge the names of folks who are already on board, but so stay tuned after hopefully after the first of the year we can give you all an update on that. And we've decided to push for a cloud-based hosting model, one that allows the site itself not to be moved from different platform to different platform or different hosting environment to different hosting environment as the hosts change. And really hopefully leverage some of the cloud-based applications to do some of the things that we're pulling down and taking cycles within the local hosts IT team. So there are continuing ones, challenges about the upgrades and the updates and the additions of new content and content types, but those are going to continue, but hopefully the consortium and some of its structures will allow for those processes to move ahead at a regular pace rather than I've got a grant, let's put it in and let's hold off on everything else. And here's another grant and let's move that in. So we're hoping to do it in more of a structured type way. So some of the successes I see already is we've been lucky and blessed to have continuing support from our university leadership. So through the whole process of us we actually haven't moved to the cloud and ready for its next step is that the dean of the college and the provost office have really stepped up and given us the funds to make that happen and really experiment with that, which is part of the process. And trust me, we've bumped our heads a couple of times and we're still bumping our heads, but that's part of the process. We've really slidified our strong partnership with the general counsel's office and we again have been lucky to have a member of the general counsel's office who I would argue and I've said this to his face would think differently or thinks differently about what we do as far as being a digital scholarship center versus a lot of the other things he's dealing with for the university, a lot of the other contracts that he's dealing with and he's been wonderful and open-minded and I think has really helped. Don't you think David help us get that formed? The flexibility is being introduced into the model, which I think is a huge success to allow other, as I mentioned, other types of institutions to join. So we're not just looking for higher ed, private, higher ed. We're looking for types different than that. And I think those had to be incorporated into the initial MOU that's being drafted as we speak. So that hasn't made it, I would argue not easier but a little more complex but hopefully well, well worth it. As I mentioned, as I just mentioned, we have an initial agreement hopefully be signed by after the first of the year, if not sooner. And then we can release some of those names and then we are hopefully going to continue to do together information on this model to see how it progresses and to see if we can share it with other institutions or other organizations who have projects of similar size and scope. And again, as David mentioned earlier, we're still being able to do innovative forms of scholarship while this is ongoing. This is the 3D model of the first ship that we created. And David also mentioned there is a second one coming out, which is going to allow for us to do some more interesting and different things. But without the consortium model, I think things like this would be hard to come by to find funding for, but hopefully that will help support these as we move forward again. So with that, I don't know, Dr. Eldridge, do you have any other thoughts? I would just add maybe the other pinning of this ultimately is usage. And we do have currently we're running at about an average of 2,300 visits a day. Without that, we would be nothing basically. All right. Well, thank you all. We appreciate it. And Diane, I think we're open for questions or comments. Terrific. Thank you. Thank you, Wayne. And thank you, David, for that really compelling overview of this amazing resource. I was just looking at it now during your talk and I tweeted out the URL. So I hope folks will take a look at this really astonishing and incredibly important collection. So thank you again, Wayne and David, and thank you to all of our attendees for joining us here at CNI's fall 2020 meeting. We really appreciate your taking time out of your busy day to join us. And without further ado, let me get straight to a question that we have in the queue, which is what is the current technology supporting the consortia? So the current technology, as, as we mentioned, the consortia has, has yet to be fully formed. But right now we have moved it from an on-prem install to AWS. And it may well move from AWS to another cloud provider as the, as the first host institution of the consortia becomes identified. And, but right now it's moved there. So we've been able to take right now advantage of a lot of the, a lot of the type of management systems that AWS allows as far as load balancing and search and things like that. And I think that just in itself has made a statement as to the importance of cloud hosting versus on-prem. And hopefully it'll move, you know, it'll continue. The, the, the thought is for it to continue to be a cloud hosted service. And that, that will allow for, you know, easier, easier running of the system as we move ahead. Does that answer? I hope that answers the question. Yeah, Robin, let us know if, if, if you want more details on that and thank you for your question. And Robin says, thank you. And others, please chime in with any questions you may have about the, the resource itself or the consortium. And I was just going to ask Wayne and David, anybody who's interested in becoming a member, what, what do you recommend that they do? Should they just reach out to you by email or zero process? I don't know what that kind of formal process set up yet. I think it may be something that has to be left to the consortium. Basically, I guess we don't want to tie hands at this point. But the whole, the central concept is that the membership should be temporary and renewable. And clearly we're going to be all the consortia is going to be going to be looking for new members pretty well continually. But at the moment we have no formal process established. So that's a, that's a stay tuned for your update in the spring. Yeah. Okay. Yes. After, after a steering committee and operational committees get, get informed. Terrific. I was also curious to know you mentioned that one really important feature of the resource. Is the data analytics tools that are built in. You said that those are really popular. Do you have a sense of what percentage of the visitors are actually making use of those tools? I don't think we do. Something we should have. I have to say that the, I think they could be improved. We don't make extensive use of international statistics, for example. And this is, but clearly the base for doing that. It's there and it would be, I would expect one of the improvements that would be, would be added. Some data that, that, that we had on it a while ago and by a while, I mean, maybe a year or so ago. Shows at least half of the visitors who come to the site utilize that. I think that's one of the, we can pull some recent data, but I just know that that's, that's one of the, that and there's some other ones, some other areas of visualization. That get visited almost every time someone comes to the site. That's amazing. Yeah. The video and the time lapse of popular. I don't know if you've seen the time lapse feature, but that. That certainly attracts attention. I can imagine. So. Again, thank you so much for sharing this with us at CNI. And we look forward to an update. And with that, I think I will propose closing out the public portion of this webinar and any attendees that we have who have time and interest, we invite you to stay around if you'd like to approach the podium and have a chat with our presenters. If you have any questions, just raise your hand and I'll be happy to unmute you. So thank you again for joining us. We'll have another meeting webinar in about a half hour and we hope to see you there. Take care everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.