Amanda Henley
Head, Digital Research Services
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Lorin Bruckner
Data Visualization Librarian
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kimber Thomas
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for African American Collections
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance” is one of six projects in the first cohort of Collections as Data: Part to Whole, a project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to foster the implementation and use of collections as data. On the Books is building on the products of the Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded project Ensuring Democracy through Digital Access to create a plain-text corpus of over 100 years of North Carolina session laws. In addition to creating this corpus, the project team is using text analysis methods to identify Jim Crow laws. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and present deliverables (to be released summer 2020). We will also discuss the variety of roles needed to create collections as data and how the University Libraries is building capacity for this type of work. This project touches on all three program themes, as we are developing corpora for use by researchers and instructors, transforming our organization through cross-departmental collaborations, and building tools and workflows using open source methods and reproducible techniques.