A Brief Introduction to Mapping Prejudice and Covenants
For this assignment, I chose to analyze the large-scale Digital Humanities Project, Mapping Prejudice, a project which highlights racial covenants and clauses inserted into property deeds with the intent to segregate areas in and around Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The project was driven by people from various areas of study, such as historians, geographers, librarians, digital humanists, and community activists. The website offers a goal to expose the structural racism historically prevalent in Minnesota and thus further the work of reparations.
Sourcing Data
The Mapping Prejudice project sources its information from residential deeds subsequently transcribed by cofounder Penny Peterson, the property records specialist in the team. Later, the deed data transcription required crowdsourcing assistance as thousands of deeds were being transcribed. The data was converted into data that could be mapped by other members of the team, such as Michael Corey, a geospatial, technical, and data lead director who had previous work mapping zoning and segregation, among other projects.
Services
The website offers informative resources explaining racial covenants, segregation, wealth gaps, and actions we can take to enact meaningful change in the many Minnesota communities impacted by racial covenants. The “What is a Covenant” page addresses these subjects and more, detailing its historical context and modern instances of covenants. Additionally, the page describes proper ways to acknowledge the history of this segregation and defines methods of actively taking action against these processes.
Mapping Prejudice also includes interactive maps which include time lapses displaying the various covenant data gathered in the project. Maps, such as the one pictured below, display a time-lapse of instances of racial covenant clauses found in Hennepin and Ramsey counties in Minnesota.
Presentation of Information
The Mapping Prejudice website exemplifies an intuitive, informative user experience with digital humanities projects. The website contains both interactive and static maps displaying the covenant data. Both forms of portraying data are adequate and diversify the capabilities of the audience to utilize data for sharing information from the project.
Stepping Back and Moving Forward
After thoroughly examining this digital humanities project, I have a few takeaways regarding the extent to which the project can grow. This project’s goal is to garner intrigue from a broad audience that may or may not be aware of racial segregation in Minnesota through the form of covenants in deeds. The audience covers residents of Minnesota to individuals invested in ending racial covenant clauses in deeds nationwide. The question I propose for the team behind this impactful project is how to expand this message to other areas of the nation. Communities across the United States are currently experiencing inequities due to structural racism, and Mapping Prejudice promotes the actions its audience can take to dismantle this history. The possibility of expansion or collaboration with other states could augment the project’s outreach and promote its message across larger audiences across the nation.
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Something I especially appreciate about digital humanities projects, specifically the one that you chose to look at, is the collaborative nature of them. It was cool to see how different people collaborated, just in the one screenshot that shows the hours volunteered! I also appreciate how a project like this can be so important in educating people about the past, but also about a thing that is still a problem in the Twin Cities (and many other cities). I like the question of how we can expand this digital humanities project to more parts of the country.