The University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is excited to announce a call for proposals to expand the project On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance (OTB). OTB has created two publicly accessible, plain-text corpora: one of all North Carolina Session Laws from 1866-1967, and a second one composed of laws likely to be Jim Crow laws, based on machine learning. Other outputs include a GitHub repository of documented scripts created for the project, a methodology white paper, and a website [https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/] for educators and researchers interested in Southern and African American history. Our next step is to expand the project beyond North Carolina and we are looking for partner teams from other states!
OTB has received funding from The Andrew W. Mellon foundation to expand the project to two additional states and facilitate the use of OTB products in research and teaching. Funds will be regranted to teams from two partner states, who will have sixteen months to create corpora for their own states and use the OTB training set to identify language likely to be Jim Crow laws. The OTB technical team will meet monthly with partners to adapt the workflow we have created to work with legal volumes from other states and will be available to troubleshoot and solve problems. We are accepting proposals from institutions across the country through April 15, 2022. The OTB team is eager to collaborate, learn from partners, and determine the best workflow.
For more information, see the Call for Proposals [https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/get-involved/partner-states/]. We welcome questions or opportunities to discuss ideas from interested partners- please feel free to contact Project Manager Brianna Nuņez ([log in to unmask]) with any questions or ideas or use the Contact Us form on our website [https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/contact-us/]. Please share this opportunity widely.
Thank you,
Amanda Henley
Head of Digital Research Services
University Libraries
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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