I explored “Mapping Prejudice” to better familiarize myself with the composition of DH projects. As a native Californian who recently moved here for school, I specifically chose this project because I am unfamiliar with Minnesota’s state history of racial discrimination in housing.
Project Goal
Mapping Prejudice pursues racial justice by giving Minnesotan communities the opportunity to engage with the data and history surrounding structural racism and, more specifically, clauses inserted into “property deeds to prevent people who were not White from buying or occupying land” that contributed to the significant racial disparities in Minnesota today.
Black Box Breakdown
Sources
According to the site’s “About The Project” page, Mapping Prejudice—based in the University of Minnesota Libraries and with the help of volunteers—has processed over 33,000 Minnesota racial covenants (racially discriminatory property deeds) in Hennepin County, Ramsey, Dakota, Anoka, Washington from the years 1910 to 1964.
Processes
Navigating the site it is not clear what processing methods and database the team used on the data. Instead of in the “About us” section, “The Team” section in Penny Peterson’s bio reveals the project’s use of Zooniverse as a platform for crowd-sourcing deed transcription. It is unclear to me if the project used Zooniverse for all of their data processing but at least for some of it.
Presentation
The project displays its data with an interactive map. The data appears with the progression of time from 1910 to 1964 in the “Timelapse.” Users can isolate counties by clicking on them. In the “See all covenants” setting, users can select cases in a particular year of interest and see details about the case (date, city, clause).
Curiosity
After exploring the composition of this project and not being able to find a clear account of the processes used in it,—despite “digital humanists” being involved in the project—I am curious:
What is the frequency that DH projects make their methods accessible to others? Is it a common practice? Is this value generally not honored?
Open source? Open access?
This project is open access in that you can download data for your own use on the website. While the project enthusiastically encourages volunteers to “find racial covenants in deeds and create the database we need to map these covenants”, besides adding to the data, the public isn’t able to freely modify the website.
