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on the books: jim crow and algorithms of resistance

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance (OTB) is a collections as data project that has made North Carolina legal history accessible to researchers by creating a corpus that contains over one hundred years of North Carolina public, private, and local session laws and resolutions. The project has also used text analysis to identify discoverable North Carolina segregation statutes during the Jim Crow era by training an algorithm to identify Jim Crow laws, based on the input of scholars. The team has created an open educational resource, in addition to technical documentation, that introduces humanities scholars and students to the processes involved in gathering and analyzing such a corpus. Recent funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation will allow for the expansion of this work in two ways. First, research and teaching fellows will be supported as they use existing OTB products in research and teaching. Second, legal corpora will be created, and Jim Crow language will be identified for two additional states. Research and teaching fellows and partner teams from other states will be identified through calls for proposals. Sub-awards will fund the partners from other states as they use existing OTB workflows to create legal corpora and use machine learning to identify Jim Crow language. This presentation will provide a project overview, outcomes, and lessons learned. Opportunities to get involved with the new phase of the project will also be discussed.

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March 25

Digital Humanities Pedagogy Panel