Featuring three project teams across ACLS’s Digital Justice Grant Program and its Digital Extension Program, this panel will interrogate the relationship between digital justice and disaster recovery, within various geographic locales across the Global North and South. As articulated within the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program, “digital justice” must function as both process and outcome for any aspirations towards substantial, sustainable redress and repair. This framework of digital justice has informed ACLS grantmaking in the DH realm, and it is exemplified most profoundly within the capacious and compounded nature of the “disaster recovery” work of our various grantees. Indeed, as the diversity of these digital humanities projects demonstrate, digital justice is the very method by which aspirations towards disaster recovery unfold. It is also how various kinds of “disaster recovery” work – as restorative, reparative, renewing, reviving, and unveiling -- can be articulated as such.
From Puerto Rico South Africa to Mexico, the work of ACLS Digital Justice and DEXT grantees demonstrate that digital justice as disaster recovery is multifaceted and multivalent. It can be ecological, as in the case of creating community archives featuring the oral histories of those who have survived stratified natural and financial crises within the Puerto Rican Archipelago. It can be political and social, allowing for the use of machine learning models to understand the lives, struggles, and contributions of Black women living under apartheid in South Africa. Or digital justice as disaster recovery can be linguistic, leveraging digital tools to preserve and teach indigenous languages from the Mexican Colonial period. But as these projects also demonstrate methodologically, such “recovery” work necessarily grapples with global inequities in access to technology, arguably the result of the very “disasters” that necessitate such restoration in the first place. Aspirations towards “digital justice,” therefore, must also encompass intentional and ethical resource management and collaboration on and off campus, and across the Global North and South.
The Personal Writes the Political: Rendering Black Lives Legible Through the Application of Machine Learning to Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Letters
Stephen Robert Davis – University of Kentucky, Associate Professor
William Mattingly – Smithsonian Institute, Postdoctoral Fellow
Stanley Sello – Marumo Digital
The Personal Writes the Political (PWP) is a digital humanities project that applies advanced machine learning (ML) models to anti-apartheid solidarity letters predominantly authored by Black South African women. We created a software pipeline called Careful Recall (Caracal) which automates the transcription of handwritten materials into machine readable text and conducts named entity recognition to distinguish between private identifying information from relevant research data in highly sensitive handwritten archives. We will use Caracal to extract modest datasets from selections of thematically united letters we call focal clusters. In addition we will conduct skills transfer to this collections' home archive, the Mayibuye Centre Archive.
Speaking into Silences: Building Community Archives across the Puerto Rican Archipelago
Ricia Chansky – University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, Professor
Jaquelina Alvarez - University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, Librarian
Jose J. Morales Benitez - University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, Librarian
Leveraging the resources of the Oral History Lab @UPRM—and the experience of its interdisciplinary leadership team—the proposed project facilitates the development of community-led oral history for social justice projects from inception to dissemination: tailoring technology kits, digital archives, and multimodal outputs to the specific needs and assets of four community partner sites across the Puerto Rican archipelago. Moving centers of knowledge production from the academy to the community, this project develops post-custodial community archives that remain onsite for direct access by community members, while making stories of surviving stratified disasters (and the experiential knowledges they hold) widely available through mirror collections housed at the Lab.
Ticha: Advancing Community-Engaged Digital Scholarship
Brook Danielle Lillehaugen – Haverford College
Felipe H. Lopez – University of California, Los Angeles
Xochitl Flores-Marcial – California State University Northridge
Ticha is an online, digital explorer for a corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts. (The name ticha — pronounced [ˈti.tʃə] — comes from the Colonial Valley Zapotec word for 'word', which can also mean 'language' and 'text'.) Zapotec languages are indigenous to Mexico. There is a large corpus of alphabetic texts written in Zapotec languages, the earliest dated to 1565 (Oudijk 2008:230). Reading and interpreting these colonial documents can be extremely difficult because of the challenges of early Zapotec orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and printing conventions, yet the documents contain rich linguistic, historical, and anthropological information. Ticha allows users to access and explore many interlinked layers of these texts, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations into English and modern Spanish, linguistic analysis (including morphological interlinearization), and commentary. Ticha is innovative in bringing together data analyzed in FLEx (Fieldworks Language Explorer) a system for lexical and grammatical analysis, with current TEI standards (Text Encoding Initiative) for paleographic and translational representations of texts. Ticha seeks to make this corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts accessible to scholars in diverse fields (including linguistics, anthropology, and history), Zapotec community members, and the general public.