{"id":1553,"date":"2021-07-16T21:53:03","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T21:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ds-wordpress.haverford.edu\/lacol-dh\/?page_id=1553"},"modified":"2021-08-08T03:00:34","modified_gmt":"2021-08-08T03:00:34","slug":"group-4-final-project","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ds-wordpress.haverford.edu\/lacol-dh\/project-overview\/group-4-final-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Representations of POC and Civil Rights at PWI in the 1960s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Research Question and Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

            Student publications at institutions of higher learning are instruments of memory-formation. Particularly for yearbooks and annuals, publications designed to be viewed and prompt memories, the selection of images is inherently a process of curating the reality of a time period into how one would like it to be remembered. By choosing to include certain images and exclude others, the creators of yearbooks and annuals curate what memories are recollected when viewing the publication. This is particularly impactful for the time before the digital age, before increasing amounts of everyday life can be captured in photo or video. The central research question that guided our project was thus an investigation of how the processes of memory-formation in student publications at our predominately white institutions (PWI) reflect attitudes towards people of color (POC) and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Did the images selected for memory-recollection during the 1960s reflect broader changes in attitudes towards race occurring in the country at the time or was there a reinforcement of the systemic racism undergirding higher learning as a PWI?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            The theoretical underpinnings of this project stemmed primarily from historical methodology, notably Foucault\u2019s concepts of discourses and memory formation. Concurrently, we attempted to incorporate ideas about data activism from D\u2019Ignazio and Klein\u2019s Data Feminism. <\/em>There seemed to be a connection between their assertion that sometimes how <\/em>data is collected can reflect structural issues in a project and how<\/em> the project of memory-formation in yearbooks was dictated by those curating the included images. In this relationship, the images of a yearbook were the \u201cdata\u201d that was collected and assembled to produce the final product of the yearbook. Just as ignorance, prejudice, and inherent biases can undermine the validity of data projects, the same problems affected the curation of these images and resulted in skewed perspectives of the reality at the time of their collection. It was thus the goal of this project to take a look at what \u201cdata\u201d was selected in the images and tell a story about how it might have skewed memories about POC and civil rights at the PWI during the 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

           The information from our project has ultimately led us to conclude that there was a distinct element of exclusion within the PWI memory-formation publications of the 1960s. In most years there was little, if any, acknowledgement of the broader societal changes regarding race in the publications we studied. From 1960 to 1962 there was no image of any person of color (POC) or reflection of attitudes towards race at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This visualization shows all of the image tags from the earliest years of the decade. Across the 45 source images from the first 4 years of the decade, there was little representation of POC or civil rights within the image record of the student publications. In the years 1960 and 1962 there were no images even tenuously related to our group’s inquiry. The tags from the years 1961 and 1963 meanwhile demonstrate that there was very limited visibility of POC and the civil rights movement on the campuses of the PWI at this time. The notable inclusion of POC speakers within the record comes from the controversy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being prevented from speaking on Washington & Lee’s campus in 1961 and acknowledgement of the author Ralph Ellison being the first Black speaker on Washington & Lee’s campus to fill up Lee Chapel, the largest speaking venue on campus and also the burial place of Robert E. Lee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following 1963 there was a change in the trends of the tag data and images of POC began to appear quite frequently. However, from 1963 to 1967, these appearances were almost exclusively in the role of performers or service industry workers. This perhaps reflects a perceived racial stratification within society at the PWI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 For more than half the decade POC and civil rights either did not greatly impact student life at the PWI or were deliberately marginalized in the memory-formation of that time. This changed in 1967 when POC and civil rights began to appear much more consistently in the image record and with a much greater variety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 Instead of being limited to performance and service spheres of memory, POC began to appear in the record as students, educators, speakers, and activists. This would imply that while most of the policy achievements of the civil rights movement of the 1960s took place in the first half of the decade, it took till almost the end of the decade for the political and social changes of the movement to impact the memories of students at PWI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 While this change is significant, southern institutions such as Washington & Lee displayed consistent, underlying elements of Confederate, \u201cLost Cause,\u201d and segregation imagery. From 1960 to 1970 there were consistently images that reminded W&L students of a racialized, \u201cSouthern\u201d identity, an identity that remained largely unchanged by the progress of the decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Research Methods<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our group extracted visual data from the images that appeared in the student publications The Algol, The Calyx, The Carletonian, and The Ring-tum Phi.<\/em> Machine-readable data was extracted from these yearbooks and newspapers through a system of image tags. After first compiling a source sheet of 108 different images related to the issues of POC representation and civil rights from the student publications, we then began to give each image a list of \u201ctags\u201d that either described the people\/events in the image or related the image to a potentially broader phenomenon within the historical narrative of the civil rights movement. These tags were created and assigned as we went through and viewed each image in turn; we did not begin with a set list of tags that could have been potentially less descriptive and more limiting of the information from the images. Across the 108 different source images we attributed 369 tags that when viewed independently could serve as machine-readable data points. These tags either described the people, events, or locations in the image or related the image to a potentially broader phenomenon within the historical narrative of the civil rights movement. Below is an explanation of each tag and their reason for inclusion in the data set. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After cleaning and standardizing the tag data through OpenRefine, the .csv data was linked to Tableau Public, a data visualization program that allowed us to create the above images to explain our findings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tag Breakdown<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Descriptive Tags<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n