Digital Gateway

Milwaukee's Best: CALI Conference for Law School Computing

Yesterday I got word that our proposal to showcase the work being done on the St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project at this year's CALI conference has been accepted!  Hyla Bondaref and Aris Woodham from the Wash U Law Library and I will present on the project's progress.  We plan to focus on the TEI extensions we created to reflect legal functions, genres, and roles.  The conference will take place at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, WI, June 23-25.  Hopefully we will get some good feedback from the more technologically inclined legal community - I'll let you know!

Conference update: better late than never

In November 2010, Erika Cohn and I presented a poster at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science. The theme of the conference was 'Working with Digital Data: Collaborate, Curate, Analyze, Annotate.' Our poster presentation showcased Digital Library Services’ grant-funded project to remediate and expand the content and functionality of the St. Louis Circuit Court Records Projects, as well as develop a standard of encoding for digital legal documents.

Erika and I received a lot of positive feedback from presenters and participants at the conference. Many took an interest in the project and agreed that the legal extensions that are being developed as part of the grant would be welcome addition to the TEI. A portion of our poster is below.

A Winn Win Situation

I am a writer of fiction and poetry.

I am not a student of history.

A common misperception is that history is boring; history is tired.  For me, American history was a subject doled out by an uninspired high-school teacher in small paper cups, the pill-like-sentences rattling around before we dutifully washed them down.  It wasn't until I was an undergraduate at Hope College, taking a course on ancient history, that I began to realize how I'd been led astray.

Last week I had the privilege of attending Ken Winn's lecture regarding the freedom suits of slaves in Saint Louis and the role the city's founding fathers had in slavery.  It was a wonderful lecture and it reaffirmed that history is not a list of dates, people, and places.  History is about the people who came before us; it is a retelling of their stories, a preamble to our own stories.  Listening to Ken Winn speak, I felt I was in the hands of a master storyteller, as well as a renowned historian.

My work on this project involves imaging old documents, encoding the text, reducing the daring actions of men and women to data.  The strings of ones and zeroes are so many lists of people, places, and organizations that the story has been lost to me.

Now, though, the lives and struggles of the people in the texts have pressed through the primary sources.  It's hard to imagine the fear and oppression.  It's difficult to step back and view the city and system of laws that allowed slavery, but also offered a legal process, with free legal representation, for some slaves to sue for their freedom.  These documents are their stories.  They capture a time in Saint Louis that is saddening, but is a part of the city's fabric and of its residents.  The freedom suits give voice to over three hundred men and women.  They speak of their hopes, fears, and frustrations.  People like Ken Winn help us envision our past, they allow us to pause for a moment, and to be present in another person's point of view.  If you were unable to make the lecture, there's still time to hear Ken Winn speak.  We'll be announcing future lecture dates as they become available.