Update: a schedule is now available. See below. You can also access this document here.
Documentation/research guide for our workshop is available here.
And the database we’ll be adding to during the summer workshop is here.
Parking note! We recommend you park at this lot near the corner of North Columbia and East Rosemary Streets. In the map below, it’s the large gray structure across the street from the “Rosemary/Columbia Lot” (feel free to park there, too).
Schedule below:Join us! On June 12 and 13, the Community Histories Workshop at UNC Chapel Hill will host a two-day “close crowdsourcing” session to work on on The Red Record, a digital map of lynchings in the American South. This session is being convened on the campus of UNC-CH by Elijah Gaddis, incoming Assistant Professor of Public History at Auburn University and Seth Kotch, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at UNC.
Each day will open with a keynote address designed to contextualize the study of lynching and digital forms of interpretation. Remaining time will be spent learning and working with a variety of digital tools to contribute to expanding The Red Record beyond North Carolina, with the eventual goal of mapping every lynching event in the American South. Participants will:
- Learn about the phenomenon of lynching in the American South and in North Carolina in a historic context.
- Meet like-minded individuals interested in the study of race, violence, gender, and power in southern history.
- Learn and apply practical digital skills for their own projects.
- Contribute to a dynamic and important digital project.
This workshop is open to participants at a variety of skill levels and occupations, including undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, cultural heritage, museum, or public history professionals, and local historians. Participants should have some working familiarity with word processing and spreadsheet software, though no significant experience is necessary. Registration, though limited, is free. We’re offering a limited number of participation fellowships in two categories.
- Interpreter’s Fellowship: This category offers a modest stipend to at least two recipients who will develop a new program of digital interpretation for The Red Record. This could be a new application of the project data, a new visualization, or some other form of digital interpretation or curation. Examples might include a timeline of lynching events, a new graphic treatment of some aspect of the data, an interpretive essay published on the site, or other contextualizing information. We require only that these interpretations be made with open source software, extendible to the whole data set, and teachable to our workshop participants. Fellows in this category will develop this interpretation beforehand and lead a lesson on it during the working session.
- Contributor Stipend: This category offers a modest stipend to defray travel costs and otherwise remunerate contributors. Though limited, the distribution of these funds will be prioritized so as to encourage wide participation.
We seek and encourage applicants of diverse backgrounds, ages, identities, and abilities. In order to receive stipends, all participants must complete required paperwork two weeks before the working session.
To apply, please fill out the form here (https://goo.gl/forms/zMYtVjcuRXcyRIqC2.) If you wish to be considered for a presenter’s fellowship, please include a description of the new tool or visualization that you propose. Successful applicants will be notified by May 10. Questions about this, or the controlled crowdsourcing workshop more broadly, may be directed to organizers Seth Kotch (sethkotch AT unc.edu) or Elijah Gaddis (elijah AT unc.edu.) Applications for participation are due by May 1.