The Colored Conventions were meetings held by African American men and women between the 1830s and 1890s to discuss various issues, fight for their rights, and discourse. These conventions were held in both the United States and Canada. Although these conventions started by being dominated by men, soon women took influential roles in them. The Colored Conventions Project assembled all the records of the Colored Conventions on their website to make them easily accessible to a wider public. The first visible on their website is a drawing of how one of these conventions would look like. This image although simple is used as a powerful representation of how these conventions were held. It shows the unity of black people in one space with one common goal: civil and human rights. This website has some illustrations that will give the reader a mental image of the importance of the material. 

The reader is able to explore all the conventions that have been recorded, and for his or her convenience, they can be searched by year, national conventions, or state conventions. When the specific convention is chosen, the reader will be redirected to a new page that will show a scanned copy of the text published after the convention. On this page, before opening the text the reader can know the subject of the text, the creator, source, publisher, date, type, etc. Once the text has been opened the reader has a detailed description of what happened during the convention. There are not many pictures or visuals of each of these conventions, but the information that is being shared is compelling. In spite of the vast information found on this website, these records are not complete; all the titles appear for all the conventions known to have happened, but a lot of them do not have anything recorded. Since this information is influential in understanding and appreciating the fight for black rights, it is critical that all conventions have their own records.

https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/

When looking at the conventions by the state it is relevant to observe that some states had a myriad of conventions, and a few others only held one or two. For example, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Texas had the most conventions; on the other hand, Florida and District of Columbia have one each. The first recorded Colored Convention in New York (1840) is a facsimile document that begins with the call that was given to free black residents of the State of New York calling them to meet and discuss their rights. On this call, the invitation is toward every single person that can attend, which shows how important these meetings were for those who were organizing them. Then what proceeded on the meeting is described, everything that was said by the leaders. The list of the people who were appointed to the business committee is on the first pages. Then, the rules ought to be followed during the convention, followed by the names of the men who attended it. And finally, everything else that was said each day of the convention followed by reports. One of the main purposes of this convention was to expand suffrage rights. Each convention had its own purposes. 

https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/state-conventions

https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/620

The Colored Conventions Project website, additionally to records of the conventions, has also some exhibits. One of them is an interactive map of the communities of African Americans in Philadelphia from the 1830s; which showed how connected the community was. Another one is showing schools where African American women attended alongside African American men in the 1850s. There was a strong fight for African Americal women to get an education and in 1853 the Colored Convention in Rochester decided to open the doors of a manual labor school for women to attend. Although the exhibits are significant, if someone is looking for information specifically about them, then, the Colored Conventions Project does not hold enough information.

The Colored Conventions Project is a perfect example of remediation. At first, the documents of the conventions were useful for those who want to know exactly what happened during the convention and to point out critical topics that were discussed for future reference. Now all these documents have been put on one website, more organized and accessible, so the person who reads them today can work with them. Some people may choose to use them to learn, others for small or big projects, and they can even be used for activism. Although all these records are in one place, their authenticity has been kept, they have not been edited or corrected before being put on the website. In a lot of cases, they have been typed out to make them more legible. According to the website, all the original collection is conserved in the University of Delaware Library Institutional Repository. 

A lot of times works that are adapted for different purposes and for a different public are misappropriated which can cause conflict to the author, or to anyone who has identified the importance of the original work. However, in the case of the Colored Conventions Project, all the work that has been collected has been well preserved and organized. This project has not changed the original intent of the documents, but it has expanded it. And having it be accessible to a wider public takes away the authoritativeness of them. Because, although not every single person that will come in contact with this project will be an academic, the value of the content of this project will be universally appreciated.

When talking about academic work, editors have to make a lot of choices that will determine how the work will be received by the public, how the text will be read, and how it will shape future knowledge in a field. The editor will gather material to go with the text for example journals, biographies, letters, etc. to complement the work. This will shape how knowledge in the field is received by giving some information and excluding other. By doing this, if the work is used for future academic work or reference, the information that has been excluded will continue to stay neglected and what has been included will gain more importance, which will shape how a field in academia is being talked about. In the past, there has been a lot of valuable information that “disappeared” because editors chose to not include it.

On Electronic Scholarly Editions by Kenneth M. Price, we learned about the benefits and drawbacks of having old academic work transferred into electronic sources to make it more available to the public. One of the drawbacks is that electronic work may be manipulated by people who are not experts on the field, which may have an impact on how that work is being treated and the accuracy of what is being transferred. This is done because the cost of the process is high and in most cases, this new electronic material will be available to the public for free. On the other hand, one of the biggest benefits of making academic work electronic will be that it can be expanded in ways that cannot be expanded by only having it as print. For example, scholars can add images, extra links, videos, etc. into the text. This will greatly impact how future knowledge is shaped in a field because the information that is given to the public will get expanded.

My analysis is on “From Mass Incarceration to Mass Education Fostering Collaboration Between State Prisons and State Universities” by Miriam Edwin. She gives a critic of the education system and their collaboration with incarcerated people. Stating that state universities should make education more available to individuals in prisons. By doing so, they will be benefited in different ways, avoiding recidivism and post released unemployment. By the end of her thesis paper, she describes what components wouldn’t make a program like this one successful. She claims that state funding is undeniably needed, but just as important is for universities like CUNY and SUNY to partner up to grant degrees to prisoners. It is also considered giving them the opportunities to obtain certifications for the skills they can use after they have been released to work. Edwin provided with some examples of graphics that can be helpful to the reader however most of the paper is just text which is completely understandable because it is a thesis for a Master’s Degree.
This issue is critical and extensive. In the past few years, I have heard a lot of activism hoping to benefit prisoners and also people who have been released. For society to be more informed and aware of the problems and solutions we could think of work being done in ways that are not necessarily considered academic. Different ways of artistic expression like image and video are essential for activism ad social change. I believe that the podcast with Nick Sousanis brought a relevant issue to the table of academia being more accepting of works that are not purely theoretical and textual because then the expression of the issue becomes and stronger as he did with comics.
Miriam’s thesis work can be expanded into the “real world” to create social justice and awareness for this cause. Thinking of Figuring the Word by Johanna Drucker, I was able to understand how visual representation supports the communication between academia and society. Perhaps, Edwin could expand her work outside academia to gain a bigger audience to this influential thesis.

When writing for academics, I usually start collecting my ideas in a rough draft. I usually do this process in the Notes of my computer. Later I start collecting sources that will support or contradict my argument preferably in PDF format while doing this I take some notes on them or highlight the parts I find useful. After all the material has been collected I will open a document in Microsoft Word and start typing. When I finish, I will revise everything typed. remove irrelevant information and additional information that will complement what I wrote. Then I will take the document into Grammarly to check for misspellings and grammatical mistakes. Finally, I will send it to peers and professors to revise it through Google Docs, and when they finish with that I will make the necessary corrections. 

It is fascinating how the technologies of writing have influenced my composition process. Just by describing how the process is for me I realize that my work will go through at least five different applications and websites before it is submitted or finalized. However, it was not always this way. As I read Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes I noticed that when computers were introduced for writing they were received with hesitancy. The first ones to adapt to this new technology were Science Fiction writers. Computers were not thought about as being related to literature, however, today if we think of any literary work, we know that it will eventually go through a computer. 

Before reading Track Changes I have not fully appreciated how beneficial the writing technologies of today are. Just now I notice how much more laborious and time-consuming writing would be if computers did not exist. Something thought-provoking for me is that a lot of pressure is taken away from the writer thanks to the new writing technologies. They didn’t have to think about the “perfect introduction” to start writing anymore, in fact, now we can write our introductions when everything else has been written. 

On the MLA Handle book we could see that to cite sources there is a specific formatting that has to be used. For example, using italics. However, for these “rules” to be established, computers have to be accessible for academic writing and they need to have capabilities to format the text in specific ways. They were first only found on Bravo, which was not available to the public yet and only some people had access to it. But now, most computers (if not all) have these different ways to format the text and they are found not only in Microsoft Word but also in a lot of different applications and websites. Computers and new writing technologies have made it a lot more accessible for a wider range of people to be able to create text. 

What has struck more interest for me was how things have changed. Starting with the way a book was made, which as we saw started with a long process that required a lot of expertise. Gutenberg’s machine press was the start of it all. However, it did not allow for just anyone to be able to make a book like today. Starting with the first book he made, which was the bible, he restricted what was being produced to a certain group of people who could afford it and could read it. On the other hand, he opened up the opportunity for more work to be produced and at a faster scale. Nowadays, it seems like relatively anyone can have access to a book of their liking. Also, anyone can write a book and get it published without having to invest a lot of time or money on it. There is a good side to this which is the expansion topics that are being studied, and the universality of sharing a book with someone who does not live in the same place or does not speak the same language.
I also kept thinking about all the mistakes that can be made and get replicated during both the hand press and machine-press periods. If there was a mistake on whether spelling or material it was not easy to correct it. However, today, mistakes are being corrected by our machines all the time. Just as I am writing this, I get a red underline below all the words I misspell. There are even some online websites like Grammarly that will allow us to correct our grammatical mistakes. There has truly been an advancement in how technology has impacted the way we read and write. But it is important and compelling to know how it all started.