Sources (assets):
Colored Conventions is a project that includes documents containing the minutes from free and fugitive Blacks’ “Colored Conventions” dating from 1830 to after the Civil War, striving to create awareness and social justice activism by educating scholars through research opportunities. These documents allow the voices (fighting for justice both nationally and locally) of influential figures in the movements – including writers, organizers, church leaders, editors, etc. – to be remembered through compiled materials, many of which are rare or even out-of-print.
Processes (services):
It is interactive in that it allows the option and instructions for any user to contribute to transcribing the minutes for an easier reading format (and bars indicating what percentage is completed). This gives us a different and more modern way at looking at historical nineteenth-century Black organizing documents that would otherwise be buried.
There’s also a whole teaching section with dropdown tabs dedicated to the pedagogic goals of teachers using the site as a guide. It is designed to help teachers with curriculum, transforming the minutes of a convention into engaging cultural biographies, visual artifacts, and interactive media; even includes sample assignments, resources for students to publish online through a digital humanities platform so they can further explore and engage, along with research guides.
Sections for each exhibit cover different topics surrounding the convention – one example includes black boardinghouses, black wealth, and African American women’s economic power. In addition, a symposium page that links us to the participants’ abstracts, bios, and videos, as well as the itinerary and a recap of Twitter activity during the symposium. This allows us to relive the experience (or experience it for the first time) in a sense that it incorporates social media and tools of the digital age that creates a bridge of communication and connection with scholars studying historical racial topics. The website uses online tools like Storify – making a slideshow that allows users to navigate through Twitter posts, which are compiled by searching for the hashtag #2015ccp.
Presentations (display):
Conventions are organized by year and region/national/state. The website is accessible and user-friendly for both students and teachers. Each link to a convention has a document viewer featuring the scanned PDF version of the minutes, in which users can scroll through the pages and zoom in if needed, followed by a user-friendly typed transcription.
The exhibit page consists of an introduction discussing the issue at hand and exposure to the forms of political activism during the conventions movement, then an outline mentioning factors like where the participants are from/how far they travelled to get to the convention and which particular conventions the exhibit will focus on. Users can navigate the exhibit with the right-hand menu bar which has interactive maps and menus, and biographical entries on the people, places, and culture of the conventions movement. By panning around the interactive map – jumping from one location to another and naming the participants – we are able to grasp somewhat of an idea of the limitations/obstacles participants may have faced regarding travel routes and transportation. This is important to learn about the lives and social networks of the delegates – the processes that made the conventions possible.
Slideshows on the African American attendees’ boardinghouses and dining menu gives information paragraphs with the option of clicking on specific items to find out more about it – a glimpse into their daily lives.
Pages of the exhibit are organized with a transitional statement that refers back to the recently discussed topic and how it relates to the next. Users can either go in chronological order or jump back to the beginning to access information.
When you mentioned the difficulties that participants faced in traveling to the conventions, I thought of The Green Book Map, the project we viewed during week 1. While the Green Book was published about a century after these conventions occurred, its goal of helping provide safe travel for African Americans in the U.S. indicates that the difficulties of travel lingered long after the end of slavery. Your insight made me think of ways in which these two digital projects, and perhaps even other related projects, could be linked. The digital nature of these two projects makes them not only easier to access, but also potentially less isolated from each other than they would be in scholarly paper form. If they were connected digitally (for instance, if the interactive Green Book Maps were layered over the Colored Conventions interactive map), they could more directly corroborate each other’s aims.
I really enjoyed how you broke down the sources, processes, and presentations into their own separate sections. I felt like it was more clear and concise by having the headers so readers could know what they were reading about instead of guessing what the paragraph was about. I also enjoyed how you added multiple pictures of what you were referencing that were hyperlinked for the convenience of the readers.