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DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IN

THE DIGITAL WATTS PROJECT

Melanie Hubbard @ Hannon Library/LMU

The Digital Watts Project was an English class taught in summer of 2016 that focused on the 1965 Watts “Uprising” or “Riots” in Los Angeles. The class culminated in the creation of Digital Watts, an online collection of rare Watts related materials from the Southern California Library. In the context of this panel the class is the “how” the “that” is the digital collection and the “why” will hopefully become apparent.

Over the past few years my institution, Loyola Marymount University, has begun to engage more deeply in digital scholarship and digital humanities and to take more programmatic steps, however small, towards incorporating them into the curriculum. This means we have been asking ourselves the classic question, what does it mean to do DS and DH at our university? How is it implemented and how does it fit within our teaching centric culture, our community engagement oriented curriculum, and our social justice mission? These are questions that Professor of English Dermot Ryan and I have spent a lot of time discussing. The Digital Watts Project, which we co-designed and co-taught, is, in part, a result of these conversations and the effort Dermot and I have made to find our University’s DS and DH identity.

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“Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known -- much more than any city I remember from the

South…The only thing that

surprised me about the race riots

in Watts in 1965 was that they waited

to happen.”

Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 1972

Before discussing more about the class and the digital project I need to pause and prioritize Watts. On August 11, 1965 a relatively minor police incident led to 5 days of rioting. These 5 days were the culmination of decades of institutionalized and systematic racism—Jim Crow Laws and Jim Crow Laws in all but name—that caused (and still cause) mass unemployment and poverty in South Los Angeles. Describing his experience of living in midcentury LA as an African American man, author Chester Himes said of the city and the riots, “Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known -- much more than any city I remember from the South…The only thing that surprised me about the race riots in Watts in 1965 was that they waited to happen.” By the end of the “riots” 34 people were dead and 1,032 were injured.

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Southern California Library, Fall 2015

Dermot

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archives & working with archive materials

information literacy & digital literacy

digital tools & platforms in humanities scholarship

digitize & make primary sources available online

engage with public humanities

commitment to the “promotion of justice”

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Digital Watts Project, ENGL 5998

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The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

The Fire This Time

by Gerald Horne

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The Riot Inside Me”

by Wanda Coleman

“Venus in Two Acts”

by Saidiya Hartman

“Google Search:

Hyper-visibility as a Means

of Rendering Black Women

and Girls Invisible”

by Safiya Noble

The Power to Name

by Hope A. Olson

READINGS

Digital Watts Project, ENGL 5998

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“Economic Conditions of Watts in the 1960s”

Robert Singleton, LMU Professor of Economics

“Google and Race”

Safiya Noble, UCLA Professor of Information Science

“Community Archives”

Yusef Omowale, Director of the Southern California Library

“Public History & Public Humanities”

Amy Woodson-Boulton, LMU Professor of History

SPEAKERS

Digital Watts Project, ENGL 5998

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Weekly Blog Posts

The Fire Next Time Word Analysis w/ Voyant

Los Angeles Times & Los Angeles Sentinel Analysis

Twitter Sentiment Analysis

Digital Project Analysis

DH Annotated Bibliography

Digital Watts

ASSIGNMENTS

Digital Watts Project, ENGL 5998

We designed a number of assignments that we intended to enrich students’ understanding of Watts, other past and current issues concerning race, digital humanities and public humanities, and we continually worked to draw connections between all of these things.

One of our most productive and engaging assignments involved using the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Sentinel databases as distant reading tools to help identify shifts in rhetoric about and coverage of the Watts uprising. (LA Sentinel is an African American owned and operated newspaper.)

Digital Watts was the final class project. For it, students were required to digitize artifacts from the Southern California Library and create metadata for them. The main challenge we faced was the metadata creation, which library director Yusef Omowale said needed to work for a general public in particular the South Los Angeles community.

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Watts Riots

Watts Uprising

Watts Rebellion

Watts Revolt

Terminology

To help prepare the students for the metadata process we had multiple discussions about language, categorization, issues of representation, and the like, topics that fit well within the focus of the class whether we were creating metadata or not. For the actual metadata process, what we did was basic. The students spent time studying the artifacts, pulling out potential descriptive terms and keywords, and then added them to a Google spreadsheet for class discussion. The idea was that we, as a group, would apply what we had learned throughout the semester to create a collective list.

Some terms were tricky. This being one of the best examples: What do you call this event, a riot, uprising, rebellion or revolt? The answer depends on who you ask and when. We opted to let the materials speak for themselves when possible, so if the artifact says, “Riots,” that is how it is written in the object description. For the subject terms we chose “Watts 1965,” because it is both emblematic and as neutral as we can be.

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“In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan, Emmett Louis Till, was lynched in Money, Mississippi. Photographs of his corpse, in state, and lines of hundreds of mourners, appeared in either Ebony or Jet magazine or both—they graced our living-room coffee table along with Life and Look.”

Wanda Coleman, “The Riot Inside Me,” 2005

I am going to give one example that I think demonstrates how our discussions about race, language and categorization, as well as our focus on literature, archives, etc. came together. In her phenomenal 2005 short story “The Riot Inside Me,” Wanda Coleman recalls a magazine article about the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and how his mother, Mamie Bradley, held an open casket public funeral so that anyone could see her son’s savagely beaten body. Coleman writes: “In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan, Emmett Louis Till, was lynched in Money, Mississippi. Photographs of his corpse, in state, and lines of hundreds of mourners, appeared in either Ebony or Jet magazine or both—they graced our living-room coffee table along with Life and Look.” It turns out that it was Jet magazine.

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An images of Emmett Till in his coffin, showing the horrific violence committed against him

Jet Magazine, September 1955

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New York Times, September 1955

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New York Times, September 1955

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dh.lmu.edu/

digital-watts-project

melanie.hubbard@lmu.edu

Digital Watts

In some of our earliest conversations about DS and DH, Dermot and I, thinking about our University’s mission, mulled over the idea of starting some kind of larger social justice-oriented project that multiple classes could contribute to. Without consciously thinking about it, it seems that is what Digital Watts may be. As of now, the collection contains 62 objects, many of which are compound, the master files are tiffs and the working copies are pdfs and jpgs. All master copies have been given over the Southern California Library and I hope to work with them soon on migrating our Omeka based online collection (metadata and all) to their own Omeka project, which has yet to be launched. We intend to add more their materials over time as well as other digital components. This semester students in Dermot’s Critical Methodology class will be adding annotated bibliographies of literary works that can be used to help teach the collection. In the future, we hope to engage other classes in the project, be they history, urban studies, African American studies or the like.