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Subject: search.filters.subject.AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records

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    Data Visualization: A New Way to See Historical Records in the AFL-CIO Archive
    (2024-06-06) Eidson, Jennifer Gathings; Fettig, Rosemarie
    In the outreach phase of the Advancing Workers’ Rights grant, a three-year project that digitized over 90,000 pages of records from the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department, creating social media and blog posts about the newly-available materials resulted in a quest for different ways to represent the materials in a unique, interesting, and user-friendly way. This search led us to explore data visualizations, for which a broad spectrum of graphical representations of information and data is possible. Two archivists discuss how a collaboration between student assistants and SCUA staff resulted in the creation of a series of data visualizations - maps, word clouds, and timeline graphs - that transformed the metadata from the digitized materials into unique and useful graphics. The graphics provide a new point of entry into the collection by using freely available tools like DataWrapper and Voyant, and the existing capabilities of Excel. The dataset originally exported from ArchivesSpace for use in Archelon was used for this outreach project and provides an example of how existing datasets can be reused to analyze collection materials in new ways. After applying these methods and tools to the materials selected for digitization, about 30% of the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records, we will share additional visualizations that comprise the complete records of the collection for further comparison and analysis of this approach.
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    Repairing Archival Description: AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records
    (2024-04-04) Eidson, Jennifer Gathings
    This presentation was shared at the Fighting for Freedom: Labor and Civil Rights in the American South symposium on April 4, 2024. Increasing access to the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department records involved many people and milestones over the course of three years. Through a digitization grant partnership between the University of Maryland and Georgia State University, over 100,000 pages were made accessible beyond the reading room. This grant project consisted of selection and preparation for digitization, rights research, creation of digital repository metadata for aggregate harvesting, landing page development, and outreach. In addition, archival description was reviewed and edited as a social justice initiative as part of this grant work. This is otherwise known as “reparative description” - the remediation of language that excludes, silences, harms, or mischaracterizes marginalized people in the finding aid created by archivists to describe archival resources. This session will focus on reparative description by sharing an overview of the process and share examples of edits made in the collection finding aid and view selected digitized documents