Seeing Editors: Metadata, Machine Learning, and the Shapes of Social Justice

Please join the NEH Division of Preservation and Access and the Serial and Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress for a very special event on September 15, 2020 1:00 to 2:45 PM ET.

Sponsored by the National Digital Newspaper Program, this panel discussion will present the efforts of a multi-disciplinary team to learn about the editors behind newspapers on Chronicling America. How do we locate the hidden labor of editors, especially in newspapers that fought for social justice? 

Each panelist will share their complementary projects, taking the multiethnic press of Louisiana as a test case. Joshua Ortiz Baco will speak about his work with the title essays to illuminate women and people of color who worked as editors. Jim Casey and Sarah Salter will share an excerpt from their ongoing work to develop critical methods for reading the collaborative craft of editing as a language of its own. Benjamin Lee will present his recent Library of Congress Labs Innovator-in-Residence project, the Newspaper Navigator, as a way to explore the visual patterns of historical newspapers using machine learning. Across each presentation, uncovering the history of editors through Chronicling America offers a way to learn how people in the past used the press to wrestle with difficult political questions and to advocate for justice for their communities. 

After the panelists’ presentation, we intend to open the event up to an approximately 40-minute Question and Answer segment. The moderator, NEH Senior Program Officer Molly Hardy, will take questions over the chat, and then will field them to the panelists who will then respond. 

Please join us through the Library of Congress’s Webex using this link: https://tinyurl.com/y2jzmfem

There is no need to register for this event.