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Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson

Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha L. Taylor

In their 2013 essay, “Can Digital Humanities Mean Transformative Critique?” Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips ask, “What would digital scholarship and the humanities disciplines be like if they centered around processes and possibilities of social and cultural transformation as well as institutional preservation? If they centered around questions of labor, race, gender, and justice at personal, local, and global scales?” (Lothian and Phillips). As digital humanities scholars invested in critical race studies, we share their concerns, and we applaud the recent work in the field that draws attention to these questions. But we are also invested in the development of a practice-based digital humanities that attends to the crucial issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the undergraduate classroom and beyond. Our White Violence, Black Resistance1 project merges foundational digital humanities approaches with issues of social justice by engaging students and the community in digitizing and interpreting historical moments of racial conflict.2 The project exemplifies an activist model of grassroots recovery that brings to light timely historical documents at the same time that it exposes power differentials in our own institutional settings and reveals the continued racial violence spanning 1868 Millican, Texas, to 2014 Ferguson, Missouri.

An Activist Model of Grassroots Recovery

As our cultural heritage is being transferred from print to digital form, we must ensure that we do not perpetuate known biases. In the previous volume of Debates in the Digital Humanities, one of this chapter’s authors, Amy Earhart, critiques the digital “canon that skews toward traditional texts and excludes crucial work by women, people of color, and the GLBTQ community,” advocating for an activist model of grassroots recovery projects to expand current digital offerings (316). This model could also help to allow broader participation in canon expansion. Rather than the current digital project model, one that relies on a high degree of expertise and knowledge, as well as substantial funding, grassroots recovery approaches emphasize the use of entry-level technology and broad partnerships, with particular attention to community and student participation. We select technologies with low entry points so as to encourage this range of participation. Here we disagree with those who see digital humanities projects as too complex or too difficult for introductory courses, such as Peter J. Wosh, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Esther Katz. We reject an approach that “relies more on describing and critiquing projects than examining the challenges inherent in creating digital projects,” instead maintaining that embedded skills development is possible within such courses, and that undergraduates may make meaningful contributions to digital projects (Wosh, Hajo, and Katz). We are also concerned that an overreliance on high-end technologies in digital humanities projects necessarily excludes those outside of well-funded, elite academic institutions. As we watched news from Ferguson and later Baltimore, it became apparent that citizens on the ground were closest to the news and were using social media to share their experiences. We view this as a compelling reason to keep skills at an accessible level so that they can translate from the classroom to the community. In our classrooms, we teach “small” digital humanities skills such as data collection, metadata application, and analysis. We are invested in working with community activists and students, both of whom have much to add to scholarly work. Accordingly, we structure our projects to provide entry points for a range of collaborators. Ours are projects that can grow over time. The careful structuring of a classroom exercise allows for the development of an increasingly complex and sophisticated project as budgets and skills grow.

A collaborative project between this chapter’s authors and the students in their respective classes at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and Texas A&M University (TAMU), White Violence, Black Resistance, provides an important example of how grassroots projects can teach research, recovery, and digitization skills while expanding the digital canon—in this case, as it relates to race, violence, and Texas politics.3 White Violence, Black Resistance privileges the recovery of historic primary sources and literary products languishing in our university special collection and archives. Accordingly, Earhart has focused on the recovery and curation of primary materials related to the Millican riot, an 1868 race riot in Texas, while Taylor has collected materials related to Prairie View A&M women. As we were collecting and digitizing these materials, the United States was hit with waves of violence against black bodies. As the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner made the news, our historic project gained additional contemporary significance. Activists’ use of social media to document and draw attention to recent events reaffirmed our desire to include local communities in our projects. Taylor, who began to collect tweets associated with the hashtags #ICantBreathe, #BlackLivesMatter, #BLM247, #Ferguson, and #JusticeforMikeBrown, was shocked by the eerie echoes of the language used during the coverage of the Millican riot and how it was replicated in contemporary coverage of violence against African American men. It redoubled our desire to broaden the digital canon with respect to white violence and black resistance, since those issues remain crucial to our understanding of contemporary events.

By viewing our project as activist in nature, we are able to tap into alternative understandings of project development. Most digital humanities work is premised on an acquisition model, wherein a project or center must accrue money, staff, space, and hardware so as to complete meaningful digital projects. We wondered how we might, instead, think about a dispersal model, one designed to decenter traditional power structures by shifting power centers, eliminating funding needs, and reducing the necessity for advanced technical knowledge. What does it mean to create a truly student-centered project? What does it mean to rethink archival ownership? How do we redefine the relationship between scholarship and community? Might we allow subject specialists who lack high-end technical skills to participate in digital projects? White Violence, Black Resistance was designed to answer such questions as we leveraged expertise and resources across historical areas of divide. We also followed the lead of GO::DH co-founder Alex Gil, who argues that diversity of approach is the key to access (see also chapter 16 in this volume for Ernesto Oroza’s interview with Alex Gil). Indeed, resources and support vary by borders and by institution and are fundamentally local. In our project, citizen scholarship and community interest in the recovery and analysis of historical and cultural materials provide invaluable resources. In designing our project, we have prioritized the development of a space for community activists and citizens to participate.4

TAMU and PVAMU: System Institutions with a Twin Past

We are acutely concerned with inequitable distributions of digital humanities resources and labor, given the divergent histories of our home institutions, Texas A&M University (Earhart) and Prairie View A&M University (Taylor). Prairie View A&M University first opened in 1876 as Alta Vista Agriculture & Mechanical College for Colored Youth, the same year that Texas A&M University was opened as the land grant Agricultural and Mechanical College.5 During segregation, the two universities were divided by race, and they continue to be divided by resources. Though the state constitution in Texas clearly indicates that both are “universities of the first class,” they have not seen the funding allocations that would realize this (Woolfolk, 27–28). Rather, the campuses continue to be marked by a separation of race and resources that constructs Texas A&M as a predominantly white (PWI) research university and Prairie View as a historically black (HBCU) teaching university.

Over the course of our collaborative project, certain practical implications of this racially charged history became apparent. For instance, Taylor discovered that the two universities have had different attitudes toward the development of special collections materials (Gabriel; Owens). Certain types of preservation were viewed as a drain on limited resources that exacerbated existing power differentials. According to an informant, the racial tensions and pressures of creating a space:

The inequitable treatment of HBCU libraries within larger university systems is a pervasive problem. Irene Owens documents the difficulties that such libraries have faced in terms of space, personnel, and collections, and the library at Prairie View A&M is no exception (“Stories Told yet Unfinished”).7 Funding issues for a variety of campus-related preservation projects at PVAMU have only recently begun to be addressed. We view our project as another way to help equalize the imbalance between institutions. For example, Taylor discovered, during her time working on the PV women’s materials, that many PVAMU-related documents had been moved to the TAMU special collections. Yet the materials were often stored haphazardly in back rooms at the main campus, effectively hidden from the cataloging system and therefore from use. Through our collaboration, we have been able to find partners at both institutions to help review the collections. The Dean of TAMU has promised to return the materials pending the findings of the investigation; the process of repatriation has begun.

White Violence, Black Resistance reminds us of the range of means by which power differentials are replicated within the academy. When we selected Omeka as our platform, we each asked our institution to host the software on a campus server. Omeka is available either as a free software program that an individual or organization can install and run on a server, or as a for-fee service through which the software is hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. We initially hoped to install the software on our own servers, as there is greater ability to customize the site with local control. Unfortunately, hosting the Omeka software proved difficult. Texas A&M University has strict rules that prohibit faculty from running small-scale servers, making a self-run Omeka installation out of the question. Earhart’s interest in using Omeka began a formal inquiry into content management systems run by the TAMU library, but at this date neither the library nor the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (the IDHMC, TAMU’s digital humanities center) have installed Omeka. So, institutional support of this sort of collaborative pedagogical work proves challenging at Texas A&M University. To complete the project, Earhart used her research funding to purchase access to an RRCHNM-hosted Omeka installation. Taylor, on the other hand, found Prairie View A&M University supportive of Omeka hosting due to its pedagogical applications. Taylor was able to secure the annual purchase of Omeka access through university funds for student research and faculty development, yet she was unable to persuade the university to support Omeka on its own servers due to concerns over student access to Omeka as a data curation space. The launch of the project through Omeka, then, was impacted by our universities’ understandings of their respective missions—teaching versus research—and institutional rules about server access.

The divergent missions of these universities also impact the ability of their faculties to access research funding, whether through conference travel or release time. When our paper on White Violence, Black Resistance was accepted at Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland, for example, Taylor was unable to secure travel funding, so Earhart attended and presented the paper with Taylor skyping in to the session. But other institutional structures present greater impediments to the project’s success. Taylor was able to locate a GIS specialist, Noel Estwick, who taught her students basic mapping approaches to historical data, a partnership nearly impossible at TAMU, where tenure and promotion requirements encourage faculty to privilege research productivity over pedagogical training. Through the project, we have learned that successful partnerships must circumvent the limitations of specific institutions and find strength in partnerships that remove barriers. Rather than assuming that the research institution has greater resources, our partnership reminds us that every institution can make valuable contributions to carefully constructed projects.

Such partnerships require careful management of the ownership of materials and digital content, however. Given the past history of removal of resources from PVAMU to TAMU, we carefully considered symbolic markers of ownership in the project. We decided that individual pieces of the project might be housed on the respective scholars’ institutional server, but that the project website needed to be neutral, a space deliberately unaffiliated with either university in its domain registration and visual branding. We chose a Google Sites page as a federating space in which to gather our materials and eschewed institutional labels or logos.8 Given a history of institutional exploitation, we wanted to emphasize in simple ways that Texas A&M and its affiliated faculty and students were not going to co-opt materials or work from Prairie View A&M. At the same time, we wanted to individuate the projects and give students control over their engagement with them. The discrete representation of individual digital objects within Omeka allowed students to delineate their own items while at the same time contributing to a larger project. Omeka became a bridge through which we could model student research across the two universities, emphasizing individual archival collection and collaborative moments of interaction between the classes.

DIY Digital Projects: Choosing Tech and Teaching Choices

Central to the recovery project has been a sense that historical and cultural narratives have often erased Prairie View and other primary black towns and spaces in Texas and within our university system. Will G. Thomas III and Elizabeth Lorang argue for “an alternative modality of engagement with the digital on our campuses—one built around reciprocity, openness, local community, and particularity.” We view projects like our current work as a way of disrupting such erasures, using carefully constructed technological projects to spread digital cultural empowerment through both universities and student bodies. Much as we saw activists using Twitter to promote change during #BlackLivesMatter campaigns, we too see technologies as opening spaces of intervention. Here we also agree with the FemTechNet whitepaper that Internet technology “strains the capacity for respect and the appreciation of the nuances of diverse backgrounds which increases the intensity of the work that must be done by teachers and organizers of the learning process.”

To locate the voices, spaces and places where African American contributions have been most actively present, yet also actively erased or silenced, we have been careful to create digital structures that reveal rather than conceal. Such erasure, we found, occurs both symbolically and literally. Our project intervenes in current structures of production through the digitization and dissemination of materials about white violence and black resistance found buried in difficult-to-access archives, crumbling newspapers, analog and/or transcribed oral histories, and unknown journals. We focus on the recovery of cultural objects that have been underrepresented in digital archive collections, artifacts that discuss the racial violence, tensions, and other aggressions (micro and macro) in our localized Texas environment. This project brings to light the very different university and social structures in which our students reside. For Taylor’s predominantly black students, the recognition of historical racism and violence against African Americans is far less surprising than it is to Earhart’s predominantly white students. In Earhart’s class, students often struggle to come to terms with the horrific mutilation and lynching of a black Methodist minister, Reverend George Brooks, that occurred a mere twenty minutes’ drive from campus.9 The difference in student perceptions of the Millican race riot mirrors national understandings about violence and race. After Ferguson, numerous polls showed that black and white Americans perceived race issues very differently. For example, a December 2014 Gallup poll, cited in U.S. News and World Report, revealed a statistically significant difference in the view of racism (Cook). The same patterns are replicated in our classrooms, reminding us of how significant it is to engage students in such complex and troubling history.

When Taylor discusses the idea of erasure with her students, she is careful to focus on how individual stories have often been silenced. As V. P. Franklin reminds in his text, Living Our Stories, the voices of African Americans are crucial to the American project. While the slave narrative is the first, and, Franklin argues, the only real American literary tradition, it gives birth to a power inherent in the names and naming of black lives. Franklin impresses on his reader that in the telling of the stories there is a resistance to silence and erasure. The power of the narrative is held within the black body telling the story. For students engaged in the digitization of documents, it becomes important to name as many aspects of the document, such as the author, the place of publication, and the race of the participants, as possible. This naming happens in the creation of a plain but common language system used for metadata. It also gives both Earhart and Taylor an opportunity to discuss how racial descriptors that may have once been in vogue can change over time. In conversations with students, there have been deep discussions about the use of racial descriptors that appear in historic newspapers and photo captions. So where Franklin would argue that there is power in the telling of the stories, we would assert that there is particular power in the story of metadata as a searchable discourse that expands or contradicts the data. For this reason, we encourage students to think about how the use of descriptive terms of race such as “colored,” “negro,” “white,” and “mulatto” function historically and contemporarily, in both historical documents and our current digital project.

In Taylor’s class, students worked on projects related to the Prairie View Women’s Oral History Project, which redresses the fact that very few of the published histories of the university mention the women who were on the staff or faculty of the institution. Among the oral histories collected from women who have had a thirty-year or longer relationship to the university, students interviewed Dr. E. Joahanne Thomas-Smith, the longest serving upper-level woman administrator in PVAMU history.10 Students uncovered a number of women who came to Prairie View and returned as staff or faculty members, including Lucille Bishop Smith. After finding that there was little mention of the first women who attended Prairie View A&M, students discovered evidence of a washerwoman on staff in 1878 (unnamed in the annual report) as well as female students in attendance. The project collects narratives, personal papers, photographs, and audio and video recordings related to the growth, development, and maintenance of the university, its students, faculty, staff, and surrounding community through a “deep dig” into the university archives, expanding the digitized canon of works collected and archived by the university. The items that students located were often well known to senior community members but missing from the official digital archive.

In Earhart’s class, students researched a local history event, the Millican race riot of 1868, a conflict that occurred in Millican, Texas, a town located fifteen miles from Texas A&M University campus.11 Details remain unclear, but we believe that Reverend George Brooks, a local Methodist preacher, former Union soldier, and Union League organizer, led his congregants to drive a Klan parade out of Millican, which sparked several days of conflict and the deaths of numerous black Millicans, including Brooks. The event was covered by newspapers across the globe, yet when the event is discussed by scholarship a watered-down version with glaring inconsistencies is presented. For example, in Still the Arena of the Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas, 1865–1874, Mary Jo O’Rear notes that in response to the supposed lynching of Miles Brown, the black militia “took Brown’s boss, plantation owner Anthony Holiday, hostage” (275). Students’ research of newspaper archives, marriage documents, and Census materials reveal that the relationship between the Holiday or Halliday family and the black community is complex. Andrew and William Holiday, sons of the former Brazos County plantation owner Samuel Holiday, were involved in the riot as well as black freedmen who share the surname Holiday, suggesting that they were either owned by the Holiday family or were relatives of the white Holidays. Clearly the complexities of the local situation demand recovery to bring the riots and the participants into focus.

The White Violence, Black Resistance site functions as a common space for the two courses as well as a classroom space. While we are interested in producing a high-quality research project, we continue to position student learning and shared inquiry before the production of the archive. This is a crucial distinction, as we do not want to lose student agency and participatory learning in our desire for a finished site. Paul Fyfe calls the interaction between classroom and research “a terrific opportunity to join students in shared projects of inquiry and explore new aspects of the discipline” (85). To this end, we evaluate student learning based on tasks completed within a project during the course through carefully constructed markers of assessment. For example, students are asked to apply metadata to the individual items that they include in the Omeka site. To facilitate this task, we workshop the project with a metadata specialist in the library and incorporate a discussion of the limitations of metadata, which is particularly important when dealing with the complexities of race. We also ask students to write reflections on the experience of applying metadata so as to have them apply humanities interpretations to technological functions. As Lindsay Thomas and Dana Solomon note, “Asking students to use, break, and comment on a project currently in development—and then, ideally, repeating this cycle—transforms how they think about the project itself and about their roles as researchers, students, and developers.” Finally, we see students as part of a process of creation and fully expect that materials that they create will undergo review and revision similar to the peer review process of scholarship. We remind students that they will be given credit for the work they produce. At the same time, we make clear that process-oriented projects mean that various partners might revise items submitted to projects, much as an editor would suggest revision to scholarly articles and books.

Here we understand digital pedagogies as closely akin to the way writing and communication has been taught. Process remains the central goal, not just product. Accordingly, students take an active role in the project, some driving to local sites related to the project to collect graveyard records and others seeking relatives whom they might interview about ties to Prairie View A&M University. Students select particular areas of interest with which to engage, giving students ownership and responsibility for constructing their own attributed sections of a larger federated site. We are focused on what E. Leigh Bonds calls a “methodology of experimentation—of teacher and student producing knowledge rather than delivering/receiving it” (“Listening in on the Conversations”). Crucial to our belief in a student-centered, activist project we follow the principles of the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights for attribution.12 Accordingly, each student was given a form to fill out that requests students opt in or out of the public display of the project. While we might require that students complete work on the project for the class for credit and grades, we must give students the right to opt out of the public display due to safety concerns or privacy issues.

A focus on points of resistance is central to student learning. Just as we as faculty collaborators interrogate moments of resistance in our partnership, we encourage students to understand how points of resistance in their own work, in the historical narrative, or the technical interface reveal crucial moments of engagement and insight. Instead of following a lockstep approach to a text, we ask the students to creatively interrogate the text within a broader context. As Ann Hawkins argues, “the textual condition I find most commonly in my students: [is] a textual boredom.” By asking students to engage with the consideration of how such resistances shape knowledge, the project spurs student engagement and skills development. Omeka’s use of Dublin core metadata provides one such moment of interrogation. Dublin core metadata is a fifteen element form of description that is purposefully “broad and generic” (Metadata Innovation). While the broadness of the metadata makes it broadly applicable, the danger of such a metadata form is a loss of the specific contours of certain cultural experiences. Application of metadata forces students to consider their materials as nuanced and complex. Instead of merely conducting close readings of materials, as would happen in a traditional literature or communication studies course, the application of metadata helped to push students to confront crucial concepts that we teach in our courses. For example, the software defines the creator category as “an entity primarily responsible for making the resource” (Omeka). Students questioned how to apply the creator category to newspaper article reprinted or extensively quoted in other newspaper publications. They also wondered how to attribute the creator of oral histories passed down from parent to child and preserved by the black community. Such questions help us to reframe the way that ownership becomes culturally constrained.

Most powerful is the ability of such projects to shift the relationship between student, teacher, and community. “In such networked humanities projects, . . .” notes Alan Liu, “the paradigm changes to one in which the teacher and student stop looking through the text just at each other, turn shoulder to shoulder, and both look at a different kind of project they are building together—one that, as in the case of a Web site, allows them to look through it to a public able to look in reverse at them” (314). The ability to have students work with faculty and to allow the public to view the type of work that we accomplish is powerful, particularly within the current environment of distrust of the academy. Students are interested in classroom activities that have an impact, and “there is clear evidence that students are not dominated by new media (as the NEA reports),” according to Tanya Clement, “but instead feel an increased sense of creative control and therefore a desire to participate in society and actively engage in ‘generative practices’ that herald social change” (“Multiliteracies”). Students who participate in our digital projects uniformly note that the work is a highlight of their college career, a project that meant something important to them and to their learning experience. The community benefits from our work as well through expanded access to the topics we are investigating. Many of the resources related to our project, such as contemporary newspaper accounts, are paywalled. As university faculty we have access to a substantial number of resources that remain unavailable to the general public, whether digital, such as digital newspaper databases, or physical, the permission to examine archives. As we have received feedback from the interested public regarding our project, it is clear that the inequities of access have impacted what the interested novice might be able to learn about these events. Hence, we have focused on collecting and making open access to primary resources related to the events we are exploring.

Our work has revealed that the print record tells only one piece of the story of such racial conflicts, so we have turned to the local community to flesh out the record through oral histories. Contemporary newspaper reports give the numbers of dead in the Millican riot from zero to sixty persons. Oral histories from the local black community suggest that the number was far greater than reported. By including oral histories we present other stories and perspectives, learning from local communities with long memories of such events. Such projects encourage our students to interact with the community, to move off of the campus grounds, while also expanding their understanding of cultural and historical events. The opportunity to work with the community also provides student agency. Saklofske, Clements, and Cunningham note that “students need not only collaborate with academic colleagues, but also with their wider community. The mutable nature of the digital environment demands flexibility, so that students can be allowed to bring their own ideas, knowledge, questions and topics into the learning environment, as opposed to the strict set of guidelines that might be imposed by an instructor of administration.” While acknowledging that such freedom could seem “daunting” to students, “we must recognize various means of knowledge contribution through unique and differing methods of communications” (Saklofske, Clements, and Cunningham). For students this has meant a greater connection to the events and people of the past. Moreover, students are empowered to think critically about the ways that not digitizing the stories of the local community further silences them. Students working with the Prairie View Women’s Oral History Project recognize that Prairie View’s rural location and agricultural focus allows for a localized knowledge of history that is often invisible to those outside the university community. Curating digital exhibits with the aid of community members provides needed institutional and social memory context. To ensure that local knowledge is not exploited or misrepresented, projects are created in collaboration with community members and the faculty member.13 Of course, a connection to the local community needs to be carefully navigated. Given the historical past of our universities, community members rightly fear exploitation. Any connections to the community need to be carefully built, paying attention to power dynamics.

At a moment where black bodies are under threat, attention to the historical roots of such violence is crucial. Through the engagement of students and the community White Violence, Black Resistance creates a digital record of past violations that have a direct impact on how we understand Ferguson, Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other such contemporary events. Student exploration of the historical events through primary documents provides an important space for students to come to terms with such events and to position these historical events in relationship to current events. The creation of digital canons where such events are erased allows us to believe that such acts are random occurrences of a few individuals rather than systemic actions that have origins within American culture. Through careful attention to historical inequities within our institutions, with the attention to power dynamics between students, faculty, the university, and our communities, our project provides a model of digital humanities engagement with complex issues of race and social justice while also providing needed expansion of the digital record.

Notes

Bibliography