Digital Gateway

Ken Winn to give lecture

April 1 Friends of Tower Grove Park Lecture Series

“St. Louis Freedom Suits in the Era of Henry Shaw” 

From the Friends of Tower Grove Park website: 

Presented by:  Dr. Kenneth Winn – Librarian of the Missouri Supreme Court

The Dred Scott Case was the most famous of a series of St. Louis “freedom suits” filed by hundred of enslaved African Americans seeking their freedom through the St. Louis Circuit Court.  These court records contain the nation’s single largest repository of slave freedom suits. 

The vast majority of these cases have only recently received the archival conservation and organization necessary to make them available for scholarly study. 

Dr. Winn will share the fruits of his research in these records and reveal a hitherto hidden realm of contentiousness between African Americans and the men who claimed to own them. 

 

 

 

 

HDW Happenings

We want to pass along two news items from our colleagues at the Humanities Digital Workshop.

First, the Humanities Digital Workshop is now taking applications for the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Digital Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. The full announcement is available here.

Second, the HDW and the the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures will be offering a hands-on workshop on the topic modeling software MALLET. It will be held March 2, from 1-4 p.m. in the Arc, Olin Library, Level A. The workshop is led by David Mimno from Princeton University and chief maintainer for the MALLET Machine Learning toolkit (whom I met briefly years ago when he was at the Perseus Project). This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in the subject!

Please register in advance by emailing Matt Erlin merlin <at> wustl <dot> edu.