Numerous stories of the civil rights era have been told and retold in movies, documentaries, blogs and through the many interviews that are freely accessible online. This project will explore the personal stories of the generations that lived through the Civil Rights Movement. These personal narratives are distributed among archives in various collections around the country and this project will attempt to examine a selection of interviews across the collections.
A Tapestry of Voices will use Voyant an online text analysis tool, to explore at least one of the following questions: What are the personal stories of the civil rights period about? Who was involved? Where do the mentioned events take place? What events were spoken about? And more importantly How did these experiences compare across the states?
The Collections
The Civil Rights Digital Library has collated a robust collection of interviews and personal narratives that are online and freely available for research purposes.
For this project four collections were identified from the Civil Rights Digital Library and selected because of their open access policies and the availability of digitized PDF’s interview transcriptions.
Eyes on the Prize
Housed on the Washington University Digital Gateway, this collection consists of the interviews that were conducted for the PBS Eyes on the Prize Series that aired in January, 1987. These individuals were actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement from 1954-1965.
Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South
From Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this collection documents African American life during the time of legal separation in the American South, from 1890s to the 1950’s. The complete collection consists of 1,260 interviews.
The Library of Congress Civil Rights Project
This collection is a product of the Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 and records narratives from people who participated in the Civil Rights movement. Interviews were taken over a five-year period from 2010-2015.
Somebody Had To Do It: First Children in School Segregation.
This is a small collection of interviews from the Low Country Digital Library. These interviews. from the “first children” to integrate public schools, are a part of the Somebody Had to Do it exhibit that examined the history of school desegregation in South Carolina and other Southern States.
The Data.
In looking for data from a variety of collections I needed data
- That would be large enough to be analyzed by Voyant ( over 70 interviews)
- Diverse enough to show a variation of experiences and stories, yet related in some respect, so I could make claims about the whole collection.
- Interviews that were available in a digital format that could be recognized by Voyant.
- Interviews that were readily available with open access permissions for research purposes.
The data for this project does not consist of the complete collections. Due to time constraints it was necessary to select interviews from collections that made the interviewee’s birth information available either in the metadata or in the interview itself. Interviews from the following states were selected because they provided sufficient interviews across collections that could be analyzed via Voyant.
- Alabama
- Georgia
- Mississippi
- South Carolina
- North Carolina
I arranged the data into several Corpuses:
- Collections ( I corpus/4 Documents): To explore the stories within the collections. I combined interviews from each collection as one data set. Each collection consisted of interviews arranged chronologically according to the birthdates of the interviewees. The following collections were used.
- Eyes on the Prize
- Library of Congress Civil Rights Project
- Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South
- Somebody Had To Do It:First Children in School Segregation
- States: To explore and compare stories within each state. I combined interviews from each state into one data set. Each state is a document and consists of interviews arranged chronologically according to the birthdate of the interviewees.
Explore the Interviews
Explore The Stories in the Collections
This section will explore the collections.
What are the interviews about in each collection?
Has the focus and purpose of the project influenced the stories and accounts told in the interviews?
Are some regions absent from these collections?
Explore The Experiences in the States
This section will explore the interviews within each state .
What are the interviews about in each state?
How did life compare across the States?
Did individuals in different states recall similar events and experiences?
