Library of Congress Labs Letter Recap of 2022 Summer Fellow Projects

As summer draws to a close, the LC Labs and Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI) teams are grateful for the time we shared with students and recent graduates from around the country who joined us for summer fellowships. This month's newsletter highlights some of our favorite moments! 

CCDI Junior Fellows Conduct Digital Research Projects

In addition to hosting three grant programs, the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI) offers multiple summer fellowships via the Library's Junior Fellows Program. Last summer, CCDI Junior Fellows Darshni Patel and Joshua Ortiz Baco explored the Library's digital materials to identify collections that speak to the histories of Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and/or other communities of color across the 50 U.S. states, District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands. 

This year's cohort expanded to include six students: Megan Bauerle, Cailee Beltran, Alondra Ceballos, Camille Dantzler, Roger Davis, Jr., and Ghazal Ghazi. Each fellow blended the goals of the CCDI program with their own research interests and presented their findings via StoryMaps, a digital multi-media storytelling platform. 

Megan Bauerle's project, From Camp to Campus, "explores Japanese Americans’ experiences in higher education during the [period following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor] by closely examining incarceration center events and community voices recorded within the Japanese American Internment Camp Newspaper collection." 

Cailee Beltran's StoryMap, Memories of the Fields, "is a memory project that examines and contextualizes selected images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information’s Black-and-White Negatives to construct a narrative representing Mexican and Mexican American fieldworker communities” in the Imperial Valley of California from 1935-1944.

Alondra Ceballos' project, titled Vitality in Mexican Colonia, "expands the narrative of the Great Depression by detailing the adversity faced by Mexican immigrants in the Southwest borderlands."

Camille Dantzler's StoryMap Buy the Route is "an auto ethnographic genealogical study of the Dantzler plantation in Orangeburg, South Carolina. It uses the evolution of Black labor from enslavement through WWII to assemble a wider dialogue on family history as a descendant of the enslaved on the Dantzler plantation."

Roger Davis, Jr.'s project, Increasing Access and Opportunity, "uses the African American History Online Guide and resources from the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP) digital collection [to] explore the oral histories of African American activists who influenced the Freedom Struggle of African Americans, specifically higher education."

Ghazal Ghazi, in Unraveling 'Ishq, chronicles historic uses of "the Arabic word, ‘ishq, which is used in Persian and other languages to mean passionate love." Her project uses poetry, miniature painting, and calligraphy from the Persianate world to "explore ‘ishq in three of its manifestations: divine Love (ishq-e haqiqi), earthly love (ishq-e majazi), and a third category where poets walk an ambiguous line between divine and earthly love." 

Check out all six StoryMaps at the links above and visit the 2022 Junior Fellow Display Day page for recordings of each Junior Fellow presenting about their work. 

Iowa Ph.D. Students Sketch Solutions

For the second year in a row, LC Labs has been a proud host of the University of Iowa's Digital Internships in the Humanities (IDIH) program, which offers Ph.D. students in English and History a chance to gain professional experiences outside the academy. 

Senior Innovation Specialist Meghan Ferriter continued the tradition Labs began last summer of putting on a collaborative "design sprint" in addition to the fellows' individual projects on non-consumptive research with text and communicating rights information to users. 

The 2022 IDIH fellows, Sydney O'Hare and PJ Zaborowski, brainstormed pedagogical models for a hypothetical scenario involving workplace learning. In only 2 days, they worked with Library of Congress staff to identify the contours of the problem, connect with real user needs, create and test a solution, and make decisions about what to do next. 

Curio

• Volunteer Vignette spotlights Youngstown State University Student Transcription Club: The By the People recently interviewed Youngstown State University student and transcription club leader Julie Centofanti. Julie found the Library's crowdsourced transcription program while looking for virtual ways to volunteer during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

• Labs supports innovative pilot: As described in this collaboratively authored Signal blog post, Labs recently participated as a partner in the AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) initiative and pilot. The pilot demonstrated potential paths for adapting “Cue chunk data” extracted from preservation WAVE files via BWF MetaEdit and inserting annotations using an open source workflow.  

• Don't miss the National Book Festival on Saturday, September 3!  The 22nd annual Library of Congress National Book Festival will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Sept. 3, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. (doors open at 8:30 a.m.). The event is free and open to the public. This year's theme is "Books Bring Us Together." A selection of programs will be livestreamed online and videos of all programs will be available shortly after the Festival.

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