On Digital Humanities and My Job

I don't often talk about my work, but seeing as I'll be doing it 40 hours a week for the next seven weeks, maybe it's not such a bad idea to give everyone a little 'splaining.

If you followed the other blog linked to this account, you probably know I'm a writing consultant, as I used that blog to discuss the training process and the challenges I expected to face as a writing consultant.  But what you may or may not know is that for the last three years, I have worked at the UR Digital Scholarship Lab.

The DSL is a Digital Humanities research lab.  To a lot of people, digital humanities sounds like something of an oxymoron, because the humanities (history, philosophy, etc) tend to be pursuits we naturally link with neo-Luddism.  Okay, no, most people don't think it's an oxymoron -- mostly, they just kind of look at me like "huh?"

Our work in the lab is some bizarre hybrid of historical research and computer science skills that come together to create interesting historical resources which match the modern age -- interactive maps, updated digital archives, things which make often inaccessible research or concepts modern and graspable.

My pet project since I've worked there has to be Visualizing Emancipation -- an interactive map of the emancipation process during the Civil War.  A lot of people think (and we're certainly taught) that Emancipation happened when Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation and, like a magic spell, all the slaves were free.  Maybe, if your education was a little more in-depth, you were taught that what gave the emancipation of slaves legal teeth was the passing of the 13th Amendment.  Yay no more slaves!

What VE shows is the fact that the process was much more complex than that, and also precisely that -- it WAS a process.  Every emancipation event in the database corresponds to a primary or secondary source which can point to the exact date at which a slave ran away, was liberated, was re-enslaved, or any number of other major events which focus on the fact we're not just talking about a historical or political moment in time.  We're looking at the lives of people with real agency and whose freedom was not simply given to them.

This is not even to touch on the continuing plight of slaves and human trafficking victims which persists in a country that points to a point in history as the time when Americans stopped owning other Americans.  But that's a topic for another day.

For the time being, if you want to check out what I've been up to or the Visualizing project, you can go to http://dsl.richmond.edu, http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation, or follow the project on twitter at @vizemancipation.

Historically (and digitally) yours,
Rachel Leigh