Digital Gateway

Lindenwood University Students Contribute to St. Louis Freedom Suits project

Just as the "St. Louis Freedom Suits / Legal Encoding Project" was concluding its official grant period last August, I was contacted by Professor Jeffrey Smith, Chair of the Department of History at Lindenwood University. He had been put in touch with the project by Michael Everman, Archivist at the Missouri State Archives-St. Louis. For several years, Smith had sent students to research historic lawsuits from the St. Louis Circuit Court at MSA-St. Louis, and similar materials from the St. Charles County Historical Society’s Archives. Though page-images from all the cases now in the "St. Louis Freedom Suits / Legal Encoding Project" have been available for several years, the transcription of the cases, improved search and expansion of materials in the new project made the resource a new proposition for instruction.

Professor Smith directed students in his "American History to 1865 Advanced Survey" and in his "Senior Seminar in History" this past fall to the new resource. Students selected a single case, and explored the case in depth. In addition to the more usual scholarly output of term papers, students also created spreadsheets with some of the basic information about the persons involved in the cases they reviewed. These spreadsheets were sent here to Digital Library Services, and the information they have provided will be incorporated back into the site over the next several months—we hope in time for new classes in the fall! Thanks to the contributing students, Kami Ahrens, Trace Curvey, John Hough, Alex Ledbetter and Brian Peterson, and especially to Professor Smith for helping to enrich the resource.

On the Record: St. Louis Freedom Suits Project article & video

With thanks to Washington University writer Evie Hemphill, and University Public Affairs, the article on the IMLS-funded “St. Louis Freedom Suits / Legal Encoding Project” previously published in the University Libraries’ magazine, Off the Shelf, appears in the Washington University Record today. It is accompanied by a video from public affairs, with Professor David Konig, and Project Director Andrew Rouner.

Announcement: "The St. Louis Freedom Suits / Legal Encoding Project" public

In the fall of 2009, the Washington University Libraries, in partnership with the Missouri History Museum, was awarded a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services for a multi-faceted project with two primary goals: 1) the development of a set of extensions to the TEI to encode historical legal documents, and 2) the transcription, encoding in TEI and the legal extensions of all the cases from the St. Louis Circuit Court Historic Records Project.

While the site for the new, IMLS-funded project site has been up and accessible for several months, we are pleased to "officially" announce the site today, which includes full transcriptions of 480 civil cases, 22 city directories, over 1000 African-American "freedom bonds," and other features and content.

For the Washington University Libraries, the date does not mark the end of work on the project. We continue to add content and functionality, and especially to promote the extensions to the TEI for encoding historical legal documents for other projects.

It does mark a time for us to thank the many contributors, advisors and friends of the project, as well as colleagues who have come and gone over the course of the project.

Dred Scott, famous Missourian

On May 9, Dred Scott was inducted into the Hall of Famous Missourians on the second floor of the Missouri state capital. Dred and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in 1846 in St. Louis and the case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. Ultimately denied their freedom, the Scotts' case was a prelude to the Civil War. Another honoree was Susan Blow, a member of the Blow family that once owned Dred Scott but later support his quest for freedom. Read more about it in the St. Louis American.To view documents from the Dred Scott case, visit http://digital.wustl.edu/dredscott/. Look for more freedom suits and other St. Louis Circuit Court cases soon at http://digital.wustl.edu.

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. 

 

 

 

 

I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore....

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.

 

Milwaukee's Best: CALI Conference for Law School Computing Part 2

I just returned from the CALI Conference at the brand spankin' new and utterly amazing Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, WI.  If I learned nothing else from the trip, at least now I can visualize what $85 million can do!

The 3-day conference had close to 300 attendees, each one eager to learn about what's hot in the world of legal education and technology.  There were 50 sessions offered on various topics, and our presentation on the St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project was scheduled during the first time slot on the first day of the conference.  No pressure. 

With 5 sessions running concurrently, we had a small but seemingly-interested crowd at our presentation.  Hyla gave us all a history lesson on the freedom suits and their national significance, and Aris led us through the early stages of our schema development.  I discussed the nitty gritty of the current state of our TEI extensions and showed a few examples.  There were several thoughtful questions from the audience, and I think we made great strides in promoting our work to a more technologically inclined legal community.

If you're interested, you can check out our (first ever) prezi or watch the presentation webcast. 

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.

Lecture: Slave Freedom Suits 101 - Ken Winn

When: Tuesday, April 26, 2011, 2:30 PM-4:00 PM
Where: Jesse Wrench Auditorium at Memorial Hall, University of Missouri-Columbia, MO 65211

As part of the IMLS-funded "St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project," Ken Winn will be giving an introductory lecuture on the Freedom Suits and the role the Chouteaus played in the cases.  This lecture is open to the public and free to attend.