August 19, 2011 eBlackCU Announcements

Table of Contents:

1) eBlackCU Announcements
2) Other Community Technology Announcements

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1) eBlackCU Announcements

a) C-U Digital Memories Video Released

Announcing the release of a collaborative video of local digital
memories recorded at Champaign-Urbana Days.

The C-U Days Digital Memories project is sponsored by eBlackCU with
support from the Champaign Park District, National Council of Negro
Women, Champaign County Historical Archives – Urbana Free Library and
Museum of the Grand Prairie – Champaign County Forest Preserve.

We are pleased to release the C-U Days Digital Memories Compilation at
this address:

https://eblackcu.net/portal/items/show/2049.

Please see at the bottom of the page the space for commenting – we
encourage everyone to leave additional memories seeing this video may
stir within them.

Also please feel free to share this link with others.

A DVD will be available at local libraries, archives and museums
within the year. those without Internet access.

b) eBlackCU Manual Released

We are working on putting together a nuts-and-bolts manual explaining
how we do what we do. Everyone can play a part in digital community
memory.

Please review the manual and offer your feedback:

http://manual.eblackcu.net/

We need people to start using this manual so that everyone is
participating in the digitization of the community.

c) Summer Yearbook Digitization Project Wraps Up

This Summer three high school interns from Champaign Central,
Champaign Centennial and Urbana High digitized 46 high school
yearbooks from 1957 to 1990. Visit the project website to get access
to the yearbooks:

https://eblackcu.net/portal/cuyearbooks

We also are proud to release a video tutorial outlining the steps we
took to make these yearbooks available via digital technology. Anyone
can do what we did with a small amount of money and standard office
equipment.

Also watch the reception held for the interns at the Champaign Public
Library August 18, 2011:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnN4phlxgpo – Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3r_PqIZjvk – Part 2

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2) Other Community Technology Announcements

a)

UC2B Public Showcase

see attachments
All welcome to come learn about what is happening with this stimulus
money in Champaign-Urbana.

uc2b.net

b)

Look for details to appear here soon on the autumn quarterly Broadband
Deployment Council meeting and Central Illinois ARRA Awardees Regional
meeting to be held in October in Champaign-Urbana, I-Hotel:

http://broadbandillinois.org/Events.html

Find out what is happening across the state. Stay informed and make a difference

c)

Public Computing Wiki

Help keep this directory of places and programs where people can get
educated and use new technologies up-to-date.

http://wiki.eblackcu.net/

Take a minute to correct the information we have or email us with
up-to-date information

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Please email us with other community technology announcements in
Champaign-Urbana, and spread the word!

Events under way to digitize yearbooks

Reproduced from News-Gazette website:

by Jodi Heckel

If you’re looking for photos for a high school reunion, or researching the school days of family members, a new online resource could help.

The eBlack Champaign-Urbana project is digitizing yearbooks from Champaign and Urbana high schools and putting them on its website, at https://eblackcu.net.

“We wanted to do something that would touch as many people as possible in Champaign-Urbana,” said Noah Lenstra, director of the eBlackCU project. “We’re just trying to find ways to use new technology to have an impact on the community.”

The goal of eBlackCU is to provide information on local African-American history and culture, invite residents to share their memories or materials about the local black community through digital technology, and make local African-American history more visible and accessible.

Lenstra said the effort to digitize local yearbooks is an extension of a project eBlackCU undertook last summer, in which it digitized the commemorative yearbooks from an annual Cotillion Ball for young African-American women. The eBlackCU website now has digitized versions of the commemorative yearbooks dating to 1972, the year the Cotillion Ball was first held.

This summer, interns are working on digitizing yearbooks from Champaign and Urbana high schools from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. They are working with the Champaign and Urbana public libraries, the libraries at Urbana and Central high schools, and the Champaign County Historical Archives to get copies of the yearbooks.

The interns are scanning high-resolution images of the yearbooks. Then Lenstra is converting them to lower-resolution images that will load faster online. The high-resolution masters will be made available to the Champaign County Historical Archives so they can add the digital images to their database if they want, Lenstra said.

So far, the eBlack website has digitized copies of the Champaign High School yearbook from 1960 to 1965. Five yearbooks from Urbana High School are scanned but not yet online. Lenstra is hoping to digitize at least two decades of yearbooks from each high school this summer.

Some of the yearbooks they’ve been working with have had photos cut out of them. With the digital versions of the yearbooks, anyone could get an image he or she wanted without damaging the book, Lenstra said. The text of the digital yearbooks will be searchable as well, so someone could search for the name of a person for whom they wanted a photo or information.

Lenstra said the process the interns are using to digitize the yearbooks is simple and replicable. He wants anyone to be able to continue the work. Along with digitizing the yearbooks, the eBlackCU project is developing training materials on the process.

In addition, the interns working on the yearbook project will also be helping with computer classes this summer. When information about the yearbook was presented at Salem Baptist Church, several people asked for help with digitizing photos, Lenstra said.

“I think it’s really good for people to have access to these things,” said Adrian Rochelle, a Central High School junior and one of the interns who is working on the yearbook project. “It shows how this technology has advanced.”

One of the goals for the summer, Lenstra said, is for the interns “to not only learn about new technology, but to be able to teach new technology as well. We’d like to see everyone be able to use technology to its fullest.”

http://www.news-gazette.com/news/living/2011-06-27/effort-under-way-digitize-yearbooks.html

Thoughts on Keeping Track of the University of Illinois’ foot-print

In the course of developing eBlackChampaign-Urbana one of our most important finds (and also perhaps the most pressing issue we can address) is the helter-skelter way in which research (especially local research) is carried out at the University of Illinois in relation to local issues of poverty and inequality, which historically have often centered on African-Americans. A recently digitized source in the eBlackChampaign-Urbana database is a work entitled “Descriptive Inventory of Resources for the Ecology of Mental Health and Work With the Disadvantaged.” Despite the long-winded title, the work essentially consists of a listing of University of Illinois research and engagement projects aimed at working with and benefiting the disadvantaged (broadly defined), under the rubric of the then buzz-term in the academy “Ecology of Mental Health,” which bridged social work and anthropology in the last years of the turbulent 1960s.

Interestingly, this project, which began as a research project of a University of Illinois faculty member, ultimately fell into the lap of the first University of Illinois archivist, Maynard Brichford, who immediately recognized the necessity of keeping tabs on a whirl-wind campus to ensure accountability and accurate documentation. Brichford initially had hoped that the publication would be a recurring publication, but unfortunately in the late 1960s the University went through a period of accelerated decentralization resulting in the further fragmentation of campus around disciplinary and departmental boundaries, making any holistic project such as this out of reach and ultimately impossible to carry out with the already meager resources of the nascent University Archives (and the abandonment of the project by the University faculty who ultimately began it).

Interestingly, six years after this project the Institute of Government and Public Affairs released a report entitled Responsibilities in the Black Community which although a different project than the earlier volume came to many of the same conclusions – namely it is excruciatingly difficult to keep tabs on different programs and initiatives coming out of different units of the University of Illinois and Parkland College that are all aimed at working with the same community, namely African-Americans in Champaign-Urbana.

Flash-forward to today and what do we see? The latest iteration of this project of listing is the Public Engagement Portal (PEP) (http://engage.illinois.edu/), a multi-year project of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement to comprehensively list and make accessible information on upcoming and past programs of the University of Illinois that have a public engagement aspect (broadly defined). While I applaud this initiative, my main concern is the seeming disconnect in this portal between research and engagement (which is nearly as nebulous a term as the 1960’s ‘Ecology of Mental Health’). Furthermore, the Portal is good for aggregating upcoming public events, but would less useful for aggregating data on projects that because of IRB would be unable to broadcast its existence until after the fact and/or other projects that perhaps never get beyond the incubation stage, yet nonetheless need to be documented as part of the University’s foot-print in the local community. Finally, the PEP Portal seems to have very little historical consciousness, meaning that in my attendance of PEP meetings and workshops there seems to be very little recognition by the largely technologist creators of the historical situation and legacy within which this initiative is brewing and developing.

What are some of the lessons of this historical legacy?
1) In the often cut-throat politics of the University of Illinois in order for a documentation project to have any legs it needs to show results immediately, and in a language that has research value. In other words, one could argue that the failure of the two earlier projects was their inability to go beyond documentation to mining the data they produced to come up with new knowledge which could in turn be re-invested and then checked against future listings.
2) Audience is key! In the first project the audience was apparently anyone. Interested in expanding the historical record, Maynard Brichford, as an archivist, believed (as I do) that there is inherent value in ensuring a broadly accurate and accessible historical record. However, such a project was not attuned to the politics and political economy of the University of Illinois as an ever-pushing forward research one institution. In the second project the audience was apparently policy makers, with the goal of increasing more efficiency in local projects by increasing access to these programs for the targeted populations (namely local African-Americans). In the third project the audience is also broadly defined, but seems especially developed as a marketing mechanism for the University of Illinois to toot its own horn and use the power of technology to market its programs across campus more effectively.

What similar listings exist in other schools? I have not investigated this question – but would be extremely interested in finding out how other campuses have found ways to track their foot-print in diverse communities.

A final note. One of my advisers in the Community Informatics Research Laboratory, Kate Williams, is involved in a multi-year project to build a dataset documenting community informatics projects across the United States. According to the project’s abstract:

“This paper connects the concepts of memory, archives, and community informatics by describing and analyzing the experience of constructing an archive of community informatics material. It thus reports the research work of creating a dataset which can be used by many scholars in our field and beyond. The primary purpose of the paper is to stimulate some new thinking about a shared community informatics research agenda, in the context of policy shifts.”

In the field of data curation the trend has been towards the construction of discipline specific data-sets, yet I think the key-word in the above abstract is “which can be used by many scholars in our field and beyond.” I think the pressing question is data re-usability or finding ways, using technology or otherwise, to make data fit into different boxes for different purposes to get maximum bang for the buck and thereby get increased buy-in for these documentation projects. What other units, for what other purposes, would have interest in this data? How could one predict such use? Archivists have traditionally thrown up their hands at such a visionary question and just settled, especially in a time of voluminous documentation, of providing bare-bones description that benefits few but the most intrepid researchers. But there must be another way…

Professor Williams has also spear-headed a project to document the University of Illinois’ Public Computing impact in a project entitled Public Computing at 50, which has as one of its goals coming to grips with the University of Illinois’ various public computing projects and using this knowledge to construct the future. As the University informaticizes one could imagine that a project to continually document the University of Illinois’ public computing foot-print run into the same problems that plagued Brichford’s 1967 effort, namely lack of interest in contributing by diverse stake-holders pursuing their separate research projects. One of the dilemmas found by the project is the Green Street divide, or the problem of connecting the hard sciences and engineering with the social sciences and humanities. Now that three rounds of Community Informatics Seed Funding have been released it seems like there should be a data-set emerging that could be used, but why, and what incentives exist to continue this project?

Links for documents mentioned in this post:
https://eblackcu.net/portal/items/show/618
https://eblackcu.net/portal/items/show/188

http://engage.illinois.edu/
http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/5139
http://50years.lis.illinois.edu/
http://cii.illinois.edu/funding.php

Final Reception for eBlackChampaign-Urbana Interns!

Since June 7, 2010, six African-American high school and community college aged youth have worked as interns on the eBlackChampaign-Urbana Project, a collaborative project to use digital technology to enhance access to, to aggregate and to find uses for dispersed informational sources on local African-American history. Our goals with this project are to: a) celebrate local African-American heritage; b) ensure that the memories, stories and struggles of local African-American history are preserved and accessible in our digital society; c) excite local residents about the possibilities of using digital technology to revolutionize community life and community memory. Help us celebrate the accomplishments of these six interns! Join us at the Champaign Public Library, Robeson Pavilion Room C, 200 West Green Street, Champaign, Illinois, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on Friday, August 13. Drop in when you can if you can’t make the entire reception. We will have: a) presentations by the interns about the work they did and the the things they learned this summer; b) an overview of the eBlackChampaign-Urbana project – its accomplishments, its goals; c) an overview of eBlackCU into the Fall and beyond, and how you and your community organization(s) can become part of this project. Digital Memory is for everyone, not just African-Americans. ALL can use the technology that excites to digitize and broadcast their stories of community history in Champaign-Urbana. We would like to see this project grow – and everyone can contribute! Examples of how you could contribute: a) Digitizing ALL local school yearbooks, past and present; b) Making documentaries on your local and family history; c) Digitizing family, church and community organization scrapbooks, photographs and newspaper clippings. All of these projects could be done with technology you either own or could have access to, with our assistance. So join in and participate! Pizza and pop will served for individuals who RSVP by contacting Noah Lenstra, eBlackCU project director, at nlenstr2@illinois.edu or 815-275-0268 by Thursday, August 12, at 5 p.m. We hope to see you there! Noah Lenstra