Author: Maria Matlock

This week I continued to upload files to the Omeka site. I’ve managed to make good progress on it, and now there’s only about 70 items that need to be added. I’ve made separate tabs on the excel sheet for the items that need to be uploaded, and the few items that I can’t find a digital file for.

This is my last week, and my time here is coming to an end. It’s been a good opportunity and I’m glad I took it.

I finally finished the finding aid for the Race and Segregation collection! It’s so satisfying to finally see it completed and to have one less thing on my to-do list. It’s been a crazy week preparing for finals and balancing my work and school schedule, but thankfully it’s starting to wrap up nicely.

For my last week at the library I’m going to continue to tie up the loose ends for the digitization of the race and segregation collection. I only have about fifty more files to upload to the website.

As those who have been reading my blog likely know, I’ve come across a lot of sources related to lynchings in the US that have been eye opening for me. But the thousands who lost their lives to mob violence are finally getting a memorial. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is opening today (04/26) in Montgomery, AL.

The memorial looks beautiful, and has an accompanying museum which documents the lives of the people killed and the historical factors that allowed such violence to occur. The structure contains 800 monuments, representing every county in the US where lynchings occurred, and each contains the names of all the victims.

I’m really glad that something has been made to honor the people who had their lives cut short. I’m also glad that the museum acknowledges the effects of slavery that most schools overlook, like the degradation, the loss of humanity, the pain and anguish it caused for generations.

I hope I can go and see it someday. You can check out the new museum site below!

https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/

 

This week I kept working on the finding aid. I’m about a quarter of the way through now. The documents I’ve come across this week are mostly dealing with the horrors of lynching in the 1920s. Reading some of these actually makes my stomach turn.

I keep reading stories about people getting dragged from their homes at night, getting shot, burned alive. I knew that lynchings were bad, but I never realized how bad. In school they overlook the worst cases, and I was so shocked reading some of these cases that people brought to Wilson’s cabinet.

The worst one is where a local police department turned over a black prisoner to a mob, who then burned the man alive. The governor of Mississippi claimed that he didn’t have any way to stop it, and that he couldn’t call in the national guard. The thing that disgust me the most is the fact that the local law enforcement didn’t even try to uphold the rights of their prisoner. They just willingly turned him over to this horrid mob.

I’m certainly learning a lot that I didn’t know by working on this project. While a lot of the documents I’m thumbing through are kind of depressing, I think it’s good to learn about these things so that people don’t romanticize the past. I’m definitely glad that I live in the time I do now. With all the problems in the world and in our country, especially regarding race relations, we’ve made great strides away from the atrocities of our past. Hopefully we’ll continue to learn and become better over the decades.

This week I continued working on the finding aid for the Race and Segregation collection, and sorting through the digitized files. I’m about halfway through it now. Unfortunately, I’m finding way more files that were never uploaded than I’d hoped. I’ve at least made all the metadata for them so that it’ll be easier to upload them later.

On my work from home day I continued working on the finding aid, and adding more items to the list.

I wish these posts could be a bit more interesting for you, the reader’s sake. But this week I once again delved into making a finding aid for the race and segregation collection, while checking to see if things have been uploaded to the site.

The files I’m looking at this week are interesting at least, even if the subject matter is gruesome. The section I’ve been thumbing through this week has had to do with lynchings and race riots that occurred during Wilson’s presidency. The details are pretty horrible; people getting dragged from their homes, set upon by mobs and burned alive, and more things that turn one’s stomach.

As horrible as all those things are though, I think the worst thing is the reaction of the Justice Department when citizens brought pleas for them to them to do something. Time and time again, the Attorney General said that it was the responsibility of the states to resolve these issues, and that he had no jurisdiction. Essentially, he was saying it wasn’t his problem.

It’s a very dark chapter in this country’s history. Reading through these stories leave a sour taste in my mouth and a heavy pit in my stomach. The indignation and anger I feel that these people never received justice, not from the Justice Department and certainly not from their state and local governments, can be overpowering at times.

Wilson finally made a public statement denouncing the violence against African-Americans, but it was too little too late. So many had already been violently killed at that point, and a statement isn’t the same as actual legal change.

Hopefully I get through this section soon and get to something slightly less depressing. Luckily, I have plenty of podcasts about the crazy lives of others to keep my spirits up and the time passing.

This week I continued working on creating a finding aid for the race and segregation collection. The project is coming along, little by little. Although, I am hitting some snags along the way.

It seems like the collection wasn’t uploaded in its entirety after all. I’m finding several files that were never put up for public access, or files that have pages missing. Once I finish the library guide, I’ll turn my focus to uploading anything that was never put up.

Another issue I’ll have to deal with though is the labeling of the files. I’ve run into several files where they’ve been uploaded to the site, but under the wrong identifier, which has caused quite a headache when trying to find a page. This is another problem I’ll troubleshoot as I go through the process.

Even though this is a tiring project, at least I’m doing something helpful by correcting any mistakes that were made. It’ll be satisfying to finally have it completed, and correctly. If anything, this project has shown me just how important it is to have coherence and organization whenever passing projects on.

I ended up having to work from home this week because of some pretty heavy snows, which ironically hit us right after the first official day of spring. I continued working on my finding aid for the Race and Segregation collection, formatting the citations and information on each piece in the collection. However, I’ll have to put that one on hold until I can get back to the collection and continue cataloguing it.

I spent the rest of the time working on transcribing documents as usual. I transcribed one cablegram laying out the terms of the naval armistice during the first World War. This document was poorly scanned (or photographed? I can’t tell actually) so it was really hard to make out in places. Many of the black, block printed words had bled together to form solid black lines, and one side of the document was shrouded in darkness. But considering the poor quality of the image, I think I still managed to make out a good deal of it. It doesn’t seem like I’ll be needing glasses anytime soon!

 

After a very restful spring break, I’m back at the library. We finally decided to retire the cloud drop and go back to transcribing things by hand. But now I’m starting a new project which is a bit more interesting.

Now I’m working on a Library Guide for the Race and Segregation collection. This is essentially a catalogue of the items in the collection, with a section at the beginning to help historicize and contextualize the collection.

I enjoy getting to actually do a bit of research for the first section. I’ve always liked looking for things and trying to piece together bits of information. I like the challenge and the satisfaction of actually learning something of value, making arguments, and finding the evidence. It’s too bad my biographical notes section can only be a couple of paragraphs.

The rest of the library guide isn’t all that exciting. Cataloging is slow work; important, but very slow. I’m now going back through the excel sheets I made earlier in the semester to get the information I need for the catalogue.

I’ve been listening to podcasts to help keep the mind fog at bay, which creeps up easier than you think. I’ve come across some very humorous ones that have left me giggling at my desk. I’m sure the others think I’m crazy, just sitting at my desk going over a collection about race and segregation giggling. Little do they know that actually I’m listening to a story about a woman’s pet bird that is hated by the rest of her family, which features a recording of it screeching. Who knew that Macaws could sound like the velociraptors from Jurassic Park? The idea of this little bird creating such a chilling sound is extremely amusing to me.

 

I kept up with the transcribing this week. The documents are coming along, but the cloud drop isn’t proving to be as helpful as we had hoped. One problem with it is that it won’t accept PDF files, only Jpegs. So that means I have to take every PDF and convert it into a Jpeg using Photoshop. While this is an easy enough conversion, it’s still really time consuming and not all that efficient.

Photoshop can only convert one page of a document at a time, and you have to do some extra steps to keep all the pages together. I managed to get all the pages together by creating a custom panorama, where you can stitch together panels in any order you like. However, I encountered another snag because the cloud drop can only handle about 25KB images, and panoramas are about five times that.

So now I’m back to transcribing one page at a time. For a seventeen page document, this gets tedious very fast. The computer still doesn’t do that great of a job at transcribing, and if the image is bigger than 25 KB it will only transcribe about half the page. So I’m still spending copious amounts of time editing and transcribing myself.

I had high hopes for the cloud drop, and for the smaller documents it did do pretty well. But I think I’ll stick with transcribing things myself, just so I can save some time.

This week I began working on transcribing documents using Google cloud drop. This Google app has text recognition software that’s supposed to be more advanced than Adobe Acrobat, and will hopefully make our transcriptions go by faster. While it can’t recognize anything that’s handwritten (at least in cursive), it does very well at recognizing the text of several cablegrams and typewritten documents we have.

It may seem pointless to be transcribing documents that are written in print. The majority are clearly legible, and often rather short, so why transcribe them? While we may be able to read them with ease, the vast majority of computers and search engines can’t because the text is not in a format they can understand.

Let’s say you’re trying to find all documents that contain the phrase “safe for democracy”. If you type this in the search engine you will get varied results, and probably not many documents containing that phrase, unless they’ve been transcribed. This is because computers use the language of 1s and 0s. Everything you see on a computer screen is actually some combination of those two numbers, which tell the computer what to put up on your screen. Every letter in this post is also a unique combination that allows the computer to present you with a language you understand.

But most computers can’t understand words written on a scanned page, because that image does not have the underlying code that translates it for the computer. This is where transcription comes in.  Transcribing is as much for the computer’s readability as yours, and by typing out the contents of a letter into a computer, the letter then becomes text searchable.

So if computers can’t read words the same way we do, then how can Google cloud drop do it? The answer is through API, or Application Programming Interface. This is a learning software that helps develop apps, and can teach computers how to recognize things not written in computer code. A programmer creates a code that explicitly tells the computer what certain letters look like, how to recognize letters that are grouped together to form words, and even some specific words. The computer is then put to work.

However, the computer only has the basics and can’t always recognize all words. Sometimes it will still mistake certain letters for others, especially if they’re smudged or slightly too close together, causing some pretty wacky transcriptions. For example, if I see the typo “Ihope to see you againsoon”, I know that “I” and “hope”, and “again” and “soon” are meant to be seperated, but a computer will think it’s one word, or blend a few letters together like this: “agaiÑoon”.

But because it’s a learning software, you can actually correct its errors and teach it what the correct thing is, and the computer will remember that for next time. If you repeat this process enough times the computer will eventually be able to do it without help. This learning curve is what keeps many website builders from using it, except as a seperate application that won’t affect their own platform.

At the WWPL, our cloud drop is still in need of lot’s of editing, and can only handle documents under 25 KB. But it’s still saved me a bit of time on transcribing. Instead of spending 30 mins on a document, I’m spending about 15 just editing. So that’s an improvement.