The Design and Technical Development of a Version Update: The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive

The Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) at Northeastern University Library provides expertise in digital infrastructure and technical design to the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice (CRRJ) Project to create the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (Archive), a digital resource dedicated to identifying, classifying, and providing factual information and documentation about anti-Black killings in the mid-twentieth century South. As the Archive nears its first update, which expands its geographical scope and includes new cases, we, as members of the DSG, share the technical process that supported these cases as they were collected, researched, and added to the Archive and web application. We touch upon how we realize the goals of the project through use of a variety of different tools like Airtable and Clio for the various steps of the research, Python for processing the records into a tabular format, as well as PostgreSQL, Ruby, and Solr to bring that research into the Archive web application. Our presentation will be focused on outlining this technical scaffolding and sharing the intentional technical design and development decisions, from tool selection to the collaborative design process for the Archive UI/UX. The Archive seeks to render these difficult histories as visible and accessible, so as to honor the victims and their families and support the efforts for redress and accountability. Towards that end, we also touch upon the technical and process steps of our work in order to mitigate dehumanization and honor the victims while building a database that contains harmful materials. Candace Hazlett is a software developer for the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University's Snell Library. Currently, she is developing the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive for the Civil Rights Restorative Justice project, along with a revamp of the TAPAS web application for publishing TEI documents. Candace is a Massachusetts native and prior to joining DSG, developed software for local healthcare tech companies. She spends her free time reading, coding, watching Netflix and YouTube, spending time with her family, volunteering, and glamping when weather permits. Joel Lee is a data engineer for the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University's Snell Library. He works on the Boston Research Center, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, and projects with Digital Humanities Quarterly and the Massachusetts Historical Society. He was the 2021-2022 Digital Humanities Associate Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and before that he worked with the Price Lab for Digital Humanities while studying at the University of Pennsylvania.