As our work on the St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project progresses, we continually seek out places to showcase our efforts and gain support for the TEI extensions created for the encoding of legal documents. In furtherance of that goal, Aris Woodham and Hyla Bondareff of the WU Law Library and I presented at the Mid-America and Southwestern Associations of Law Libraries (MAALL/SWALL) Joint Annual Meeting in Lawrence, Kansas last week.
The program offerings at MAALL/SWALL were wide-ranging and informative, and although geared toward law libraries were quite useful for those of us (well, me, really) working in digital libraries. Some highlights were a great presentation on HTML5 by Timothy Wilson of St. Mary’s University Law Library, and another on the Campus Copyright Support Team recently created at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Meeting attendees were also treated to a keynote address by Stephen Ramsay, an English professor from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who specializes in computational text analysis and visualization. Yep, that’s right: in an attempt to show off our grant project to the legal library community - as opposed to keeping it to ourselves in the digital humanities/library world - the keynote speaker at the law libraries meeting was a digital humanities guy! I guess we really are taking over the world...
On the final day of the meeting, we delivered our presentation to a group of about 30 law librarians. Hyla gave some historical background on the Freedom Suits, Aris talked about the schema design process, and then I walked us through the TEI extensions and showed off an early iteration of the project website (Thanks, Shannon!). The response to the presentation was overwhelmingly positive. We took questions on the freedom suits themselves and the grant project workflow, and even had a lively conversation about our new favorite presentation software, Prezi. (Check out our prezi here.) Perhaps most important, however, were the conversations held after the presentation. Several people expressed interest in the TEI extensions for their own projects or had recommendations of people to contact who have legal encoding projects elsewhere. We will be sure to follow up with them in the very near future as we continue the mission to garner support for our newly-created standard.
