Step by Step

My article, “Step by Step: American Interracialism and the Origins of Talk-First Activism” has just been published in Modern American History!

Why are diversity trainings, dialogues, & social justice book clubs often proposed as first steps to creating an equitable society? “Step by Step” suggests that the answer lies in the history of an idea I call “talk-first activism.”

TLDR; in the first half of 20th century, a nationwide movement tries to fight prejudice by facilitating talk across the color line. In the 1940s-1950s, Black staffers in predominantly white Protestant organizations transform that movement through their insistence that talk must lead to action. Cue unintended consequences…

Because “Step by Step” was published by Modern American History as an open access article, you can read the article without a paid subscription! I’d be happy to discuss Step by Step with your classroom or organization.

Thanks to Sarah Phillips and the MAH team for their excellent editorial assistance, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques. Special thanks to Monica Blair, Allison Kelley, Gillet Rosenblith, and, most of all, Grace Hale for their generous and insightful feedback. And shoutout to the Smith College Library, the University of Minnesota Library, and the University of Virginia’s department of history for their generous financial support of this project!

With Care and Context

I use images all the time in class. But what about images that could cause harm? Check out my new Hybrid Pedagogy article, “With Care and Context” where I reflect on viewing lynching photographs as an undergraduate and how my thinking about the merits of teaching with such images has evolved over time.

I close my article with a few specific takeaways that I want to include here:

1. Ask yourself if showing the potentially harmful image is truly necessary. Does presenting such images prioritize the learning experiences of white students over their classmates of color? Are there ways you can convey similar ideas without showing the image?
2. Reflect on how these images fit with the rest of your course. Are most of your discussions of marginalized groups focused on pain and trauma? If so, consider how you might emphasize narratives or images of resistance, resilience, or joy.
3. Provide students a chance to opt-out of the in-class viewing. Better yet, due to classroom power dynamics, try framing this as an “opt-in” rather than an “opt-out” experience. Try listing that day as “optional” on the syllabus or consider scheduling a time outside of your regular class session.
4. Prepare your students beforehand. Provide ample context for what students will be seeing before presenting the images. Again, this context can frame how your students experience these images and help undermine their dehumanizing potential.
5. Clearly state and contextualize the dehumanizing work that the image is doing. Remind students of the personhood of those being represented in the image.
6. Maintain a posture of care. Share about your experience viewing the image and acknowledge that the experience of viewing the image will be different for different people. Though it can be harder in larger classes, be sure to check-in with your students before, during, and after the experience. Consider using small groups or “free writes” to provide students a more intimate space to process what they are learning.
7. Keep working at it. Giving careful consideration to the images you use in class takes time and persistence, but it’s worth it!

Check out the rest of the article and let me know what you think!

I want to say a big thank you to all the people at Hybrid Pedagogy who made the article better, especially Managing Editor Bethany Thomas and reviewers Brandon Morgan and Daniel Lynds. Thanks for making my first time with a “double-open peer review” process a great one! I also want to say thanks to my wonderful friends and colleagues here at UVA who gave me helpful feedback early on in the process: Gillet Rosenblith, Monica Blair, Allison Kelley, and Grace Hale. And finally, a special shoutout for the Scholars’ Lab and especially Brandon Walsh for pointing me toward Hybrid Pedagogy and digital pedagogy in general!

Review of Land and Legacy

Land and Legacy, a digital project I co-created, was recently reviewed in the May edition of Reviews in Digital Humanities.

In their review, Claire. A Tratnyek of Northeastern University made a number of astute observations about the project. I appreciated Tratnyek’s insights and generosity. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“In both form and content, Land and Legacy is an exemplar of collaborative research and the integration of digital and traditional historical methods. As scholars and citizens across the United States continue to uncover and confront the difficult histories of our localities, this kind of project can provide us with new vocabularies for interdisciplinary thinking and integrated storytelling — without sacrificing rigor or eliding uncomfortable questions.”

Reading Tratnyek’s generous review reminded me of how thankful I was to have such incredible project collaborators: Janet S Dunkelbarger, Natasha Roth-Rowland, Lauren Van Nest, and Chloe Down Wells. Working with such wonderful colleagues (and now friends!) definitely makes me want to do more collaborative scholarship in the future. Tratnyek’s review also made me super appreciative of the Scholars’ Lab community at UVA, my time with the Praxis Program, and all the incredible people at UVA and around town who helped us out along the way! You can read more about the specific roles I played on this website’s Projects page.

Finally, I want to note how cool it felt to have Land and Legacy reviewed alongside other great digital projects like “Mapping Marronage,” “GeoNewsMiner,” and “Visualizing Objects, Spaces, and Places.” If you’re not following Reviews in Digital Humanities, you should be!

Praxis in a Pandemic

Crossposted to the Scholars’ Lab blog

Before I begin this mostly self-focused blog post, I want to acknowledge that the coronavirus pandemic has affected so many people more than me. My heart goes out to all who are sick, suffering, or have died, and to their friends and families. I want to thank all those responding to the crisis and making sure people’s needs are met. You are appreciated.

I have tried to exercise outside at least once per day the last few weeks. I make sure to stay away from other walkers and runners–many of whom are probably like me and only recently re/discovered how much they love exercising outdoors. Trapped inside while attempting to social-distance makes exercising outside a wonderful breath of fresh air, a brief moment away from the attempt to do remote work amidst the steady stream of anxiety-producing news about the virus.

In the last couple weeks, there have been a number of sidewalk chalk messages along my favorite running route. One of the messages was “be gentle with yourself.” Recently, I have found my mind—and my feet—returning to that piece of advice.

A few weeks ago, our Praxis Team was struggling. The coronavirus pandemic had recently begun escalating rapidly in the United States and institutions like UVa were taking necessary precautions. These changes affected Praxis. We would no longer be able to meet in-person as a team. We would no longer be able to publicly present our findings at an in-person gathering in May. Many of us were struggling to remain focused on remote work. How could we continue doing schoolwork when the world outside seemed to be crumbling? Frankly, what was the point?

Thankfully, our outgoing project manager Chloe recognized how people were feeling. Near the beginning of our first Zoom meeting, Chloe encouraged us to have a short meeting and take the rest of the week off from Praxis. Chloe may not have used the same words as my sidewalk messenger, but she might as well have. Be gentle with yourselves, she seemed to be saying.

The week off was helpful. Though the tragedy and the stress remain present, the shock had at least worn off. When we returned, we needed to figure out how to move forward. What elements of our project did we want to prioritize and what elements should we let go of?

Our first time reconvening after the break was to meet with Barbara Brown Wilson and Alissa Diamond. They are two incredibly smart scholars who have thought a lot about space, Charlottesville, property, and equity. They had agreed to meet with us before the pandemic, and they generously agreed to keep the meeting, now to be held over Zoom. While I was glad they could still meet, I couldn’t help but wonder—how helpful will this meeting be considering our new circumstances? Would it be better to get our own ducks-in-a-row first?

To my surprise, the meeting was exactly what we needed. Our guests gave us some excellent feedback about our project. Alissa Diamond even generously offered to share some of her findings from the UVa Library’s now-closed Special Collections. I was especially appreciative of Barbara Brown Wilson’s words that all good scholars have to constantly adjust the scope of their projects. Narrowing the scope of our project was not a sign of failure. Again, the sidewalk messenger seemed to call out, “be gentle with yourself.”

I am unsure of what the next six weeks will look like. As a Praxis Team, we still want to accomplish a version of what we set out to create. We know our project likely won’t look the same as what we dreamed of creating a few months ago. But we are resolved to be ok with that. As the first bullet point in the Charter we created last fall reminds us, we value “process over outcome.”

Even though yesterday’s rain washed away the chalk, I want to continue returning to my sidewalk message. In this time of tragedy, we could all use with the reminder to be gentle with ourselves and each other.

Working on a Workshop (aka outlining a possible workshop about DH and Sound)

Crossposted to the Scholars’ Lab blog

THE BLOG

This spring each Praxis Fellow will conduct a workshop on some aspect of digital humanities. Because I study the history of twentieth-century American mass media (especially the radio), I have increasingly found myself interested in sound. During the last few weeks, I have read about the possibilities of using digital tools to analyze and present sound. I plan to share some of my findings in a workshop called “An Introduction to Sound and Digital Humanities.”

I have several goals for this workshop. First and foremost, I want to create a learning environment that is welcoming, inclusive, and relevant. Second, I hope to convey why studying sound is important. Recent sound studies scholars such as Jonathan Sterne have critiqued the idea that a culture of seeing replaced a culture of hearing; yet, this idea still lingers inside and outside of the academy. Third, I want to introduce some of the possibilities and limitations of using digital tools to analyze and present sound. I have divided this workshop (and the rest of this blog!) into three parts: Introduction, Analyzing Sound Collections, and Manipulating and Presenting Sounds. This workshop design is still in progress so I’d appreciate any comments or suggestions!

INTRODUCTION

My first priority as a teacher is to help cultivate an inclusive learning environment where all feel comfortable participating. The design of a space affects both how sounds are made and how people feel welcomed. I plan to rearrange the space into a circle if possible. As a teacher, I enjoy playing music related to the day’s content as students enter my classroom. Music can provide a memorable entry point into a topic. For this workshop, I imagine playing something like Miles Davis’s “Shhh / Peaceful” from his 1969 album In a Silent Way.

I want to begin the workshop with some questions that have a low barrier to entry. For instance, I plan to ask, “What is a sound you love and how does it make you feel?” and “What is a noise you dislike and how does it make you feel?” After giving attendees a chance to think through these questions on their own, I’ll have them share in partners and eventually share with the entire group. By beginning the conversation with reflective questions and a think-pair-share technique, I hope to encourage attendees to feel comfortable contributing verbally. I also hope this introduction will help attendees think about sound in their own lives and the connection between personal and scholarly knowledge about sound. As attendees share their answers, I will guide the conversation to tease out two ideas crucial to sound studies: 1) humans do not just hear with our ears but, as scholar Steph Ceraso has argued, with our whole bodies and 2) how the binary of “sound” and “noise” usually reflects a binary of listening to sounds that are “wanted” or “unwanted.”

ANALYZING SOUND COLLECTIONS

In this section, I hope to encourage attendees to think about the benefits and challenges of using digital tools to analyze sound collections. Much of my thinking here is informed by DH scholar Tanya Clement’s chapter in the edited volume Digital Sound Studies (2018). In this chapter, Clement describes how PennSound scholars thought about the ability of big-data to study large spoken-word audio collections for the NEH-funded High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship (HiPSTAS) project. Incorporating Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization (ARLO) software used to identify bird sounds, scholars working on HiPSTAS developed a standardized classification system to tag digital audio media so that it could be more searchable. However, as Clement notes, scholars soon came to realize that while classification systems were necessary, they were also limiting. Not everyone agreed on how particular sounds should be classified. Ultimately, Clement proposes that political and historical contexts are embedded in standardized classification systems thereby turning up the volume on how some sounds are heard while turning down the volume on alternate interpretations.

I plan to begin this section by reflecting on how sound files present challenges for scholars because they usually have to be listened to in time. For instance, I will describe how a well-prepared student may have recorded a lecture (ideally with permission!), but the student looking for a key detail from that lecture may still be required to listen to the entire fifty-minute clip just to find the desired detail. The longer the recording, the less inclined a busy researcher is to want to listen. Thus, while sound collections may have tens of thousands of hours of sound files, many of these sounds remain unheard. Thankfully, scholars have utilized machine learning to help organize sound files and make them more accessible to researchers.

I will then introduce an activity that helps students understand how this process of using machines to classify sounds works. I will start by playing three brief sound clips and asking attendees to identify five key words they would use to identify each sound clip. Though I have not finalized which audio pieces I plan to use, I usually try to incorporate material that will seem relevant for my audience. I am currently planning to use a mix of clips that draw on local history and recent popular culture. For instance, I am currently thinking about including a snippet from the 1970 anti-war protest at UVA, a soundbite from an oral history by a UVA women’s history professor, and a brief clip from Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her.

After attendees have created their five key words for each audio clip, I will give them time to share their results with a partner. Did they come up with the same key words? Different key words? Why or why not? I plan to reconvene the entire group to solicit feedback about the experience. What did they think about the sound clips? How did their key words compare with their partners? For those that had different key words, why might this hinder searchability? How could we improve this process so as to limit these differences?

After teasing out that standardizing keywords may help in this process, I hope to play the clips one more time. This time, I will have attendees classify each clip using the tagging schema developed by scholars working with the PennSound poetry collection. I hope this will demonstrate how standardization can help (though not completely solve) the dilemma of scholars selecting different keywords. At the same time, it will also demonstrate how standardized classification systems can sometimes hide as much as they reveal. For instance, the PennSound tagging schema was designed for spoken word poetry. As a historian, I selected clips that will likely invite different questions and categories. What classifications seem less relevant for these clips? What additional questions or classifications would be helpful for the three clips we heard? Finally, what sounds from these clips might be helpful for a computer to learn to recognize in other clips?

MANIPULATING AND PRESENTING SOUNDS

Analyzing sound collections is only one aspect of how digital humanities can augment sound studies. As time allows (I am envisioning the final 10-15 minutes, but if short on time this section could be cut), I hope to conclude by gesturing toward how digital tools can also allow us to manipulate and present sound. For instance, I plan to mention how attendees can use editing platforms such as the free and open source platform Audacity to create and edit sound files. I hope to ask attendees how manipulating the three sound clips we heard might promote new insights (possible ways I’ve thought about this include editing the lengthy oral history to make it more accessible to the public, adding music to dramatize the Antiwar protest clip, or manipulating Scarlet Johansson’s pitch in the clip from Her to stimulate conversations about pitch’s role in performing and hearing gender and sexuality). In this final conversation, I hope to convey how using audio technologies to manipulate sounds can be beneficial but also has limitations (see for instance Tina Tallon’s article on how audio technologies have distorted higher-pitched voices or how deceptive editing of interviews shaped public perceptions of planned parenthood in 2015).

I plan to conclude my workshop by making a few final remarks using Wendy Hsu and Jonathan Zorn’s Paperphone. In this wrap-up, I will thank attendees, subtly remind them of some key takeaways, and invite them to play with Paperphone tool after the workshop has ended.

Unlearn What You Have Learned

Crossposted to the Scholars’ Lab blog

In the last few years, I have come to realize how digital tools can help historians like me to analyze the past in new and interesting ways. As a Praxis fellow, I want to learn more about what’s out there. What digital tools could I use to augment my teaching and research? And what are the implications of using those tools?

But the truth is, for much of my life I described myself as “not a tech person.” Whenever friends would talk about computers, I’d find myself struggling to follow and soon my brain would begin to wander.

As a late-blooming “tech person,” I find myself especially susceptible to self-doubt. Though I’ve found the Scholars’ Lab to be a warm and welcoming community, during the first few weeks of Praxis I have continued to question my ability to keep up. Am I asking a stupid question? Does everyone else already understand this concept? Can I actually complete this coding homework?

I found myself asking that last question during our first coding assignment. The assignment was to create a program in Python that would translate a word into Pig-Latin. I didn’t know where to start. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck beginning to rise. I was going to be found out as “not a tech person,” and it was only Week 2.

Thankfully, Shane had suggested working in partners, and my new friend Janet had some great ideas about how to get started. Though it took more than a few tries, Janet and I eventually came up with a code to successfully perform the task. Hufflepuff, you say? How about ufflepuffHay? I was proud that I had suggested using the input function—an intervention that helped make the breakthrough. Maybe I could do this after all?

Having sipped the nectar of possibility, I found myself creating other simple programs in my free time. For instance, I created a program that asks the question every PhD student gets all too often: “How’s your dissertation coming?” After you inevitably write something like “Oh, not great actually—I’m really struggling to write,” the program replies with a piece of advice from Yoda such as, “Do or do not—there is no try!” or “That is why you fail” or perhaps something more uplifting like “Patience you must have young Padawan” or “May the force be with you!” I found myself chuckling every time the program spit back a response. Having learned about coders’ sense of humor, the program felt like my “Hello, World!” to this new galaxy of digital humanities.

One of my personal goals as a Praxis Fellow this year is to shed any lingering traces of my “I’m not a tech person” mentality. “You must unlearn what you have learned,” Yoda might say.

It won’t be easy. I’m sure this past week won’t be the last time self-doubt creeps back. But hey, who wants a year without a little adventure? Hit it, John Williams!