Overview

Pauli Murray: A Digiography is a virtual repository of Pauli Murray materials (documents, writings, sermons, images, audio speeches, and interviews) that chronicles a myriad of dimensions of Pauli Murray’s personal, professional, and activist lives. In using the extant corpus of secondary materials that scholars and print humanists have created, combined with Murray-related primary sources as data, the project intends to glean patterns, trajectories, and discrepancies between the two that are otherwise unseen or too overwhelming for traditional source analyses to capture. Pauli Murray: Digiography explores the distance between primary source and secondary source, however small or large, thus providing an opportunity for herstorians to revise existing narratives and create new projects from the strength of the virtual repository.

The implications of this project are important for Digital Humanities (DH), historical studies, and African American Studies. For DH, this project presents a new form of thinking historically through the use of DH tools. It privileges non-linear, multi-site, storytelling as process, rather than as final product. It also joins the corpus of DH projects that focus on African Americans and activism. For History, this project will force historians to reconsider their methodologies, particularly in regard to the archive, biography, and movement history. Drawing on the insights of African American Studies, specifically the discipline’s critique of Western epistemologies, this project endeavors to chart a methodology for assembling life stories that reveals factors, events, and relationships overlooked in the process of writing herstory.

Additional Contributors

Crystal Feimster’s Fall 2017 “Long Civil Rights Movement” class and student assistants: Annie Nields, Jaster Francis, Anna Milliken, Naiya Speight-Leggett, Henry Screen, Fiona Drenttel, Ayra Sundaram, Branson Rideaux, Lydia Horan, Lakshmi Amin, Ry Walker, Douglas Shao, Bianca Howell, Douglas Shao, Lionel Jin, Natalia Reyes Becerra, Anadee Mobaraki, Richard Mbouombouo, Valentina Guerrero, Max Schlenker, Katheryn Schmechel, Anushree Agrawal, Sasha Lee, Katharine Walls, Leah Smith, Elizabeth Spenst, Daniel Hamidi, Kellyn Kusyk, Elyse VanderWoude, Heeral McGhee.

This project has been generously supported by the Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory, a Yale DH Teaching Fellowship, and a Corpus Creation Seed Grant.