A Conversation with Rachel Stephens (2.3)
In this episode, Sara talks to Art Historian Rachel Stephens about a number of her Digital Humanities projects, and specifically about her most recent collaborative project, Joe Minter’s African Village.
In this episode, Sara talks to Art Historian Rachel Stephens about a number of her Digital Humanities projects, and specifically about her most recent collaborative project, Joe Minter’s African Village.
This project is the result of the work of the Task Force for Studying Race, Slavery, and Civil Rights at UA and documents their comprehensive assessment of University of Alabama Administration Records for the period up to 1865. This project seeks to ensure that all materials pertaining to slavery at the university is identify and transcribe the contents of the main record sets from this time including President Basil Manly’s diaries, President Landon Garland’s letterbooks, the Faculty Minutes, and the collection most commonly referred to as the “slave receipts.” Most important of all, however, was identifying as many of the enslaved individuals who labored on UA’s campus, or who were enslaved by faculty and college presidents, as possible and entering those names, and the records associated with them, in a database
In January 2020, two award-winning history professors set out to track the medical and media phenomena surrounding the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China. What started as a side-project quickly became an all-consuming, effort to make sense of a global pandemic. Based on extensive research, contributions from a national team of experts, dozens of interviews, and hundreds of collected stories, Drs. Margaret Peacock and Erik L. Peterson set out to examine the intersecting crises that plagued the nation. They revealed a health structure rooted in a culture of acute care that was hobbled by entrenched racial hierarchies, lasting economic disparity, and a willful historical amnesia. These factors more than anything else led to the pandemics of disease, disinformation, poverty, and violence that caused such unimaginable catastrophe.