The Bernadette Callery Archives Lecture Series and the Sara Fine Institute of the Pitt School of Computing and Information presents:

"From Scholar to System to Scale: Generating Meso-level Historical Data to Recover the Lived Experiences of Enslaved People" 

Abstract: How shall we represent their lives? The careful and responsible representation of what we can know about the lived experiences of the enslaved is a central focus of current digital work both for historians and for library and archives professionals. In attempting to answer that question, this talk will trace Leon's interconnected research agenda through three distinct but related projects: 1) an individual project focused on enslaved people in Maryland: Life and Labor Under Slavery: the Jesuit Plantation Project; 2) a collaborative effort to develop and test a linked data ontology to represent the experiences of the enslaved people who labored for educational institutions in the US: On These Grounds: Slavery and the University; and 3) a linked data driven web publishing platform: Omeka S. In reflecting on these projects, Leon will explore the ways that this work contributes both to slavery studies and to critical archival studies, and how it offers a potential model for future interdisciplinary collaborations.

Bio: Sharon M. Leon is an Associate Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Michigan State University, where she specializes in digital methods with a focus on public history.  Currently, she is at work on a project to surface and analyze the community networks and experiences of the cohort of people enslaved and sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Simultaneously, she is leading a collaborative effort funded by the Mellon Foundation to build an ontology to describe the lived experiences of enslaved people who labored for higher education institutions. Finally, she directs the Omeka family of open-source web publishing platforms.

Dr. Leon received her bachelor of arts degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997 and her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her first book, An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by University of Chicago Press (May 2013). Prior to joining the History Department at MSU, Dr. Leon spent over thirteen years at George Mason University’s History Department at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as Director of Public Projects, where she oversaw dozens of award-winning collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country.

Note: This is a hybrid event. 

RSVP: https://securelb.imodules.com/s/1729/alumni/interior.aspx?sid=1729&gid=2&pgid=5148&cid=14076