GODORT (Government Documents Round Table)

 View Only
last person joined: 19 hours ago 

The mission of the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) is to (1) To provide a forum for discussion of problems, concerns, and for exchange of ideas by librarians working with government documents; (2) to provide a force for initiating and supporting programs to increase availability, use, and bibliographic control of documents; (3) to increase communication between documents librarians and other librarians; (4) to contribute to the extension and improvement of education and training of documents librarians.

Learn more about GODORT on the ALA website.

Back to discussions
Expand all | Collapse all

MAGIRT Webinar Series: The Mapping Prejudice "Deed Machine"

  • 1.  MAGIRT Webinar Series: The Mapping Prejudice "Deed Machine"

    Posted Apr 18, 2023 11:46 AM

    Hello everyone,

    Please join us Friday, April 28th for a webinar from the Mapping Prejudice project. Details and registration link are below. Please contact me (kdyke@okstate.edu) with any questions. Thanks, and we hope to see you!

    Registration:

    https://okstate-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0oceCqrTspGtyUD4_ywZVo3gYzookzyEoT#/registration

    Time:

    Apr 28, 2023 11:00 AM Central Time

    Abstract:

    Mapping Prejudice technical lead Michael Corey will demonstrate how a new, cloud-hosted web application has the potential to supercharge the process of mapping racial covenants, clauses that were inserted in the property record to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying certain pieces of land. Mapping Prejudice broke a long-standing research logjam when it devised a new technological platform for creating comprehensive geospatial datasets of racial covenants. In Minneapolis–where the project began at the University of Minnesota Libraries–one common restriction stipulated that the "premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent." There are millions of these racist restrictions on properties across the country. But they have been extremely difficult to document since they are buried in millions of pages of documents held by county recorders around the country, and difficult to map because historic property records are not connected to modern systems.

    Since 2016, the project team has been working steadily to refine its methodology, which involves Optical Character Recognition, Python scripts, crowdsourcing through Zooniverse, and automated strategies for connecting racial restrictions on historic property parcels to the modern street grid. But over the last year, the team achieved a major breakthrough when it bound these tools together in what we now call the "Deed Machine," a cloud-hosted web application that knits together these disparate technical workflows and leverages the power of parallel computing. Corey will share the insights from this iterative process of technical experimentation. He will also explain the exciting possibilities opened up by the Deed Machine, which has the potential to help researchers across the country locate racial restrictions quickly and accurately.



    ------------------------------
    Kevin Dyke
    MAGIRT Chair 2022/2023
    Maps and Spatial Data Curator
    Oklahoma State University
    kdyke@okstate.edu
    (405) 744-4869
    He/Him/His
    ------------------------------