The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project: Interview with Gina Nortonsmith and Joel Lee
Gina Nortonsmith is the Archivist for African American History in the Archives and Special Collections in Snell Library. Joel Lee is the Data Engineer in the Digital Scholarship Group (DSG), also in Snell. They both work on the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice project (CRRJ).
Gina and Joel spoke with Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, about their work with the CRRJ and the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. Their comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: Thank you both so much for meeting with me. To begin, could you describe what the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project is?
Gina: I can take that one. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project is a part of CLEAR at NU School of Law, and among their projects is a clinical course for students. Students take this course to investigate racially motivated homicides in the Jim Crow South from 1930 on. The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) cut off date for inclusion is 1954, but the work of CRRJ investigations goes beyond 1954. What CRRJ does is investigate by looking through various groups of records at the Library of Congress, the Department of Justice and so on to identify instances of racially motivated homicides against African Americans. The project then assigns students those cases to investigate, gather more information, and identify the outcomes. As part of the investigation, they also identify current descendants of those victims and try to work with them towards some kind of restorative justice for the family. Our work was to take those documents and records, whatever they had gathered, and create an archive of those records and database.
Joel: I think it's important to delineate. Some people can couple both the CRRJ and the BNDA into one thing. The Burnham Nobles Digital Archive is the main project that the library was involved in, and the CRRJ is the organization that runs the clinic and all of that.
That is very useful, thank you. What were your roles in supporting the project?
Gina: I was hired at Northeastern as the first Project Archivist for the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. And well, it actually didn't have a name at the point that I was hired. That was one of the things we had to figure out. What are we going to call this thing? My work was to help the CRRJ figure out what their vision was and identify the different points of work to bring that to production. And so I worked with them on developing elements of the database. What was the information that they wanted to pull out? With all those records that they had collected, what did they want users to get out of this collection? How did they want users to access and use the records? Then we had to come up with workflows for getting the records from CRRJ into the archive.
Joel: I joined the project in 2023 after the first version of the archive was launched. I basically have been working on the data pipelines that run from the documents supporting the evidence for the case to the data supporting the evidence for the case. I consider how those things go from our researchers and catalogers to an actual database that surfaces all of the people, incidents and documents on the website. There's actually a pretty long and complex pipeline that takes metadata and data from our Digital Repository Service data and from Airtable that tracks information about each case and combines them together to put them on a database and then a web application.
I know the workflow was something that was evolving as the project grew. I was hoping you could speak to the biggest challenges or complexities with evolving that workflow?
Gina: I would say at the beginning it was trying to figure out efficiencies in doing the work. For instance, the law school provides a law firm management system software package for everyone at the law school to use. However, in practice they had been putting some of their records in different locations. One of the challenges was figuring out what actually was in the software management program and what was other places. Then trying to get the stuff that was other places into the software management system because that could be our pipeline for the work that Joel and other folks in the DSG were doing with the records. And then the conversation happened between me and the DSG. As a project archivist, part of my task was to communicate to the folks at CRRJ what they could do to make our jobs easier. Part of that was how they do their work and working with them to figure out ways to make it easier for them to do the things that we needed. In terms of: how to title a document in your system, how to label the different kinds of document, how to set up the folder organization to help us pull out things and make them into nice categories in the archive.
I think it is so interesting how many different groups are involved in the project. Do you think there are any lessons learned from the experience of developing a workflow for such a large project?
Joel: There's a lot of lessons that we've learned over the years. One of the biggest things that comes to mind is you really need good documentation that can apply to people at all technical levels. Like you had observed, Colleen, some of the tools we used were being used by students who would come and go over the years, researchers, historians, lawyers, catalogers, as well as people that were hired part-time that no longer work there. And so having documentation and workflow in place that's digestible and intelligible to people at all levels of technical expertise is really important. Having people staffed that can walk these people through those resources is also really important. I think we would both be remiss to not have a big shout out to Joy Zanghi, one of the project archivists, who handled a lot of the management and organization of materials for how the the process of updating the archive works.
I know the two of you were working a lot on the idea of interoperability and the final project white paper. How did that project come to be and what were the big takeaways?
Gina: A number of years ago, Professor Margaret Burnham thought that there’s power in combining work, many hands and all of that. So she, along with some other folks that she had been working with across the country, came up with the idea of combining the data and information from the various projects that were working on racially motivated violence. In her talks with them, they identified other projects who were doing this work. We call them our sister projects. We first had to figure out if our sister projects were interested in this kind of project. If they were interested, we had more conversations with them. Let's talk about the things that might need to happen. Let's talk about the ways that that might happen, and let's talk about what it might look like when we make it happen. The ways to make it happen and how it might look when it happens is where Joel comes in.
Joel: I think probably around 2-3 years ago now, Gina and I started meeting with a white paper team of people at the library and CRRJ staff. Gina was collecting a bunch of information on the different projects and we were looking at their code books and data dictionaries. I started to sketch out a bit of what the technical infrastructure of interoperability between projects would look like. Different projects across the country were collecting information in different ways that fit their own project needs. This included different information about date or time or location and also as Gina said, what was included or not included into the data set. Was it just fatal violence or non-fatal violence? Were there groups of incidents or were they documenting it on the individual level?
So there's quite a lot of complexity in trying to combine the different data sets. I did a presentation last summer when we were launching version two of the archive. Part of the presentation was about how you can create a central index that takes the fields that each project collects the same information on, transforms them and combines them into one data set. I highlighted some of the applications that you can have from that, like searching, mapping or other sorts of analysis that is possible once you get them in the same place and working with the same sorts of terminology and structure.
What was the experience of speaking and reaching out to these sister projects?
Gina: In general we had pretty good success in having people respond to us in terms of initial interest and having meetings with us. There were some project leads that had concerns about what would happen to their information, what was it that we were going to do with their data and what would participation mean for them. All of which is part of, you know, the things that Joel was talking about that have to be in agreement on to move forward. And I think we had really useful conversations with the sister projects that met with us. There was an exchange of information on methods of collection for the technical structure we were already using in the BNDA for our element groups. What we had already built was useful to them in terms of what they were trying to build, especially our data dictionary. And we also heard about the challenges that they were having with their individual projects, especially in terms of support and funding. So not even, you know, interoperability, but what they needed to do to bring their project where they wanted it to be.
Yeah, that's really interesting. This troubleshooting with similar projects is part of the mission of the CDS. The idea that all these project spaces can come out and talk to each other about different problems. It's interesting to hear about that on a larger scale.
Gina: We had a bit of that at the conference where people could meet and talk in person. I think that was really valuable for a lot of the participants.
I really enjoyed attending the conference over the summer. Was anything about the conference that either of you wanted to reflect on?
Joel: It was really interesting getting to talk with each of the projects. We had met with a lot of them on Zoom already, but getting to see them face to face and talk about interoperability and the possible futures for it was really exciting. Also it was great getting to just hear about what sorts of things that they're working on back at their home institutions and as Gina said, similar issues. I had a bunch of conversations about the positives and the drawbacks of student workers as it comes to data verification and verifying their research and things like that.
Gina: I heard from quite a few of the attendees that they appreciated being able to talk to people in person and not just talk to us. But to talk to each other, you know, and I think there were lots of relationships built at the conference because people got to hear about each other's challenges and some partial solutions. One of the sessions that I attended was about funding and website hosting, so it was really practical things like that.
What is the current state of the CRRJ and the BNDA?
Joel: Earlier this year we launched version 2.1.0 and that has a couple of small updates to records, different files that were catalogued, some files that were added and removed. We're now adding an indeterminate date of death field where we don't have a precise date for the date of death. There's a Save Record feature that our applications developer Candace Hazlett, who built the whole website, added where users who are logged in can save items. We're pretty happy with it, we were able to implement some features that were held over from version 2.0.0 and were able to get it done earlier this year.
Gina: I think outside of the library, CRRJ is investigating a way forward on interoperability and continuing the conversations with the sister projects. And so that’s kind of exciting to hear that the work might move forward.
Anything else you wanted to highlight about the project and your time working on it?
Gina: The one thing that I'd like to highlight was how much everybody leaned into the project. Even for the places where there was not an assigned task, people were very generous with their expertise and their time. Even folks who weren't assigned to the project like the Research Data Services group in the library. At times I contacted them for some information and help and they were very generous with their time and eager to help. I think that's one of the things that I found most exciting about this project was the number of people who we got to work with in the library and the support across the board.
Joel: I second all of that. Yeah, I'll just add also because I work in a technical research group, I'm talking about this in a very broad way, like the technical data pipeline and how we're moving all this stuff. But just go to the website and read some cases, that is what this is all about. The purpose is to read and remember the victims of these incidents. So yeah, we can talk about how the database and how these massive pipelines of data function for the website, but you know, for readers of this interview, they should just read some cases.
Gina: Thank you for that, Joel. I've had people ask me, how can you do this every day? How can you be immersed in all of these stories? Because they are heartbreaking. They're absolutely heartbreaking. How can you be immersed? And my response is the work that I'm doing, I feel like I am caring for those people and their stories and their families. I could not do anything to help them at the moment they needed assistance, but I can care for them now and that is how I can keep doing the work.