The stated purpose of the Colored Conventions Project is to “provide further insight into the Colored Conventions and expand our understanding of early black organizing.” From 1830 until well after the Civil War, African Americans gathered across the United States and Canada to participate in political meetings held at the state and national levels. These “Colored Conventions” “brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.”

            After considering the purpose of this digital archive, we can conclude that anyone can learn from the CCP project. The CCP does mention specific people who this archive can be particularly helpful to. Within the “Teaching” section, there is a sub-section titled “Research Resources and Classroom Modules” which states that the CCP has “developed a range of research-based teaching materials to engage faculty, students, and the general public in the rich documentary record of the Colored Conventions movement.” It goes on to state “CCP scholars and librarians have curated sample writing assignments, research guides, educational resources, and an innovative classroom teaching module, all designed to encourage investigations into the themes and debates that arose for the Black men and women who organized, attended, and supported the Colored Conventions.”

            The CCP meets the needs of the audience it is designed for in several ways. There are many different forms of media within each exhibit that help to illustrate in different ways the depth of black political organizing in the 19^th century.

Within the project is an archive of digital records of the hundreds of collected documents of the Colored Conventions movement, spanning from the 1830s to the 1890s. Listed there are transcripts of each convention with records. Within this records section, there are links so that one can search for conventions by (1) year, (2) by national conventions, and by (3) state conventions. There is also an advanced search feature where one can search for keywords from the transcripts of conventions and can narrow that search by particular “fields” such as convention type, date, location, etc. The results can be shown in a table view or an image view, and for a table view, one has options to view by “type” or “convention” and can view up to 200 results per page or “only items with images or files.”

            There is also a section that lists exhibits. That section states “these curated exhibits draw from our collections to present cultural artifacts and materials related to Black organizing in the nineteenth century.” An exhibit that is illustrative of many of the other types of media in the project’s other exhibits is about Henry McNeal Turner, who was a politician, pastor, and community organizer. One can find not only prose on the life of Turner, but also photographs and drawings of Turner. Within Turner’s biography section there is a Sutori timeline where the viewer can scroll down and read up on events from Turners life and view photographs and drawings of his mother, his wives over the years and of the institutions where he worked.

            Within the biography section is a photograph of a recruitment poster for African Americans from the time of the Civil War and an interactive map where letters from Turner and black soldiers in the Union army detailing their experiences in the war can be read. In the section titled “Turner and the AME Church,” one can view image files of book covers and title pages of works of literature that Turner was involved in. Also within that section can be found Google slides of a sermon Turner gave and image files of historical newspaper pages featuring Turner. In the section, “Turner’s Travels” there can be seen an interactive Google Map detailing Turner’s travels to and from Africa and when they were undertaken. In “Turner and the Conventions,” one can find an interactive map of the United States pinpointing visually Turner’s attendance at various Colored Conventions over the years with short summaries detailing the conventions and photos of convention’s posters. Also in this section is an interactive Google Map pinpointing places where newspaper accounts of the conventions were published.  In the section “Emigration, ” there is a Sutori Timeline detailing the ways in which the idea of emigration was repeatedly invoked during the Colored Conventions movement and it includes various historical excerpts and photos involving emigration.

            The CCP project meets the needs of it’s audience to a great extent by not only providing a wealth of information from various sources, but by having that information illustrated in several different forms of media, which allow for multiple different avenues of understanding this historical period. In reviewing the CCP project Bolter and Grusin’s “Remediation” came to mind. They stated, “digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness. . . .” This can be seen in all the various forms of media displayed in each exhibit, which gives the viewer many different ways of processing information to create a broader and deeper understanding of black political organizing in the period. The three views of remediation can all be seen within the project. The mediation of mediation can be seen in the way a Sutori timeline can remediate photographs, drawings, and prose in the form of an interactive timeline. Secondly, every form of media in each exhibit comments upon something that is real that explains, illustrates, or comments upon the work that was being done by African Americans during the time period, whether it’s something like a photograph of a newspaper passage that comments upon a specific Colored Convention or a Google Map that traced the voyages Henry McNeal Turner took to Africa to forge connections there between Africans and African Americans. Lastly, remediation functions as a reforming or refashioning of other media in the example of an interactive Google Map which visually documents in map-form the locations of local newspapers around the country which had pieces on Colored Conventions in that local area, with the map refashioning the newspaper excerpts. The CCP project is ultimately a very insightful, creative and thorough project.

First and foremost, an editor will have to decide whether she wants to engage in documentary editing or critical editing. In the former, the editor will have to decide whether she wants to use a diplomatic reprint, which preserves only the text such as the wording, spelling, punctuation, etc. An editor might also want to decide whether she wants to present the text in facsimile, including photo facsimile or make use of genetic or synoptic transcription. Lastly, also available for documentary transcription is literal transcription on facing pages and transcriptions of various states in parallel columns, as well as presenting documentary editions electronically on disks or over the Internet. With critical editing, an editor will have to decide which reading she wants to incorporate and whether to include editorial emendations that establish readings not found in any document. Specifically, an editor will have to determine which readings are authorial and contemporary with the author. Another thing to consider is whether or not the author’s intentions have changed over time. Also, has an author’s revision been made under duress, and thus is it unfaithful to an author’s intent, is a question to be determined.

            These choices shape future knowledge in a field in several ways. One way is that with documentary editing, we may simply make clear something that was unclear for many years. Also, if an author’s intent is determined during the critical editing process, we are stating what the author meant when she wrote the work, which may then have an effect on the way we view works that come afterwards, both from the author and by others in a similar field. This can be illuminating when viewed in the context of the author’s other works, but the risk seems to be that we imply meaning to the work with that was not intended.

I analyzed “Beyond the Vale: Visualizing Slavery in Craven County, North Carolina” by Marissa Kinsey. Ms. Kinsey, using historical data on the enslaved population of the county during the antebellum period, created pie charts, bar graphs, and other charts that illustrated and compared various facets of slave-life in the county at the time of the 1860 Census.

            The form of the project impacts the audience it serves in very meaningful and specific ways. The visual representations, by displaying in a visual manner stark contrasts, lay bare the brutality that was chattel slavery. In a bar graph that depicts the numbers of slaves owned per slave master vs. the number of dwellings provided, the blue bars depicting the number of slaves dwarfs the red bars that depict the number of dwellings provided, allowing viewers to imagine the type of cramped and unlivable types of living situations many slaves had to endure. In a bar graph depicting the number of slaves owned by each slave-owner, we see visually that 4 slave-owners owned more slaves than about 18 other slave-owners combined, emphasizing the fact that humans were viewed as mere property to be purchased to the most affluent purchaser. Another web-chart shows the interconnectedness of slaveholding families with not only each other, but of non-slaveholding families through intermarriage, showing perhaps visual proof of how widespread support for the peculiar institution was maintained.

            What these visual representations do for the meaning of the project is provide a foundation, a visceral one at that, for the empirical truths of slave life in the county at that particular time. Ms. Kinsey sought to provide a more balanced view of the truth about slave life in the county with the use of hard data to balance out the biased local narratives that have historically received primacy. Though hard data enables Ms. Kinsey’s bar graphs and pie charts to exist, they provide the reader with not only the truth about slave life but also a new emotional understanding of its prominence and inhumanity.

Technologies of writing impact my composition process in very specific ways. The word processor program “Microsoft Word” can be uploaded onto laptops. Because laptops are portable, my own composition process can take place in just about any environment that I can bring my laptop to and I often write in a variety of places. Keyboard design is also standardized. Any person who spends enough time typing will soon develop muscle memory regarding the placement of letters, numbers, and other symbols, and this has greatly sped up my own composition process. This is obviously different than manually writing something with a pencil or pen, which takes me a much longer time.

            Another plus of using a word processor is the “Copy and Paste” function, which was discussed in our readings.  This has the benefit of saving time and energy by transporting large amounts of text like a quote, or passage to be revised into the word document in an instant, similar to what Seth Grahame-Smith did when writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Using a word processor also helps the writer save paper, as corrections can be made in the document, and do not have to be done on countless sheets of paper, which in turn helps me and many others save some money.

            On the flipside, when composing something on a word processor like Microsoft Word, which is itself, not a tangible item like a notepad or piece of paper, but a software program, physical copies of a composition are not being gathered. They are also not being physically revised. In order to save a composition, the writer must continually “save” the piece, which poses the risk of losing some if not all of what the writer has written, if there is no automatic “save” function. This has made me a bit of a “manic” saver due to past misfortune.

One similarity that endures today is the acknowledgement that people have preferences with regard to how they consume a work. Werner states that some customers of books may have wanted their books bound, but others would be content to have them stab-stitched, which mirrors people’s tendency in modern times to choose to consume a work in varied forms including a bound book, an e-book, and even an audio book. Also, even though they were created in the 17^th century as a way for publishers to balance income and expenses, subscriptions have endured as a very popular means of consuming a work today.

            With regard to changes, mass production of works created many changes that transformed the printing process and endure to the present day. Hand-pressed books were overwhelmingly printed on paper but as Werner states, “some early books were printed on parchment” which is referred to as vellum. We no longer read on vellum because it could shrink or expand depending on the humidity, and was not convenient for mass production.

            Also with regard to mass production, the practice of the compositor being responsible for spelling and punctuation according to his custom no longer exists, and today when people read a work, the grammar and spelling is standardized according to the language. Mass production also led to paginated pages as opposed to foliated ones, because paper had to begin to be used more economically.

            Lastly, because any single book in the hand-press era couldn’t be sold until every copy of that book was printed, the life of a book would seem to be shortened, which is obviously different from today’s printing process where a work from the 19^th Century can be bought today and in essence has it’s life and legacy prolonged by continuously having its place within a culture constantly maintained and made relevant by virtue of it’s physical presence.