What is the Wayfinder Project?
The Wayfinder Project is an Emory-led effort to digitize a major bibliography of African American Newspapers called African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography. It will republish the print text—which is over 800 pages in length and contains 6,500 detailed newspaper entries—using a linked data framework. In doing so, it aims to transform the static print bibliography into an interactive data set that can be queried to learn more about each title.
Why is this important?
The newspapers and periodicals described at its foundations provide the most important and often only conduit for African American thought in the early years of Black publishing. “Because they were frequently denied a forum in white-owned magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses, African-American writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found a market for their work in their neighborhood Black periodicals,” Henry Louis Gates, notes. As such, they offer a window into “an almost self-contained universe of thought and feeling of the African-American people.”
As such, they offer a window into “an almost self-contained universe of thought and feeling of the African-American people.”
The project aims to make these newspapers more accessible by establishing a new framework for creating and sharing metadata about library resources. It recognizes that libraries are not the only source of information about our resources and seeks to empower non-professional communities to contribute data about library collections. Finally, this project reimagines metadata as not just a way to facilitate library discovery and access but as a resource that can be used for computational analysis and new research.
What have we done?
October 2020:
Librarians and Archivists at Emory University met with James Danky to discuss the potential digitization of African American Newspapers and Periodicals. Established a research team to brainstorm project ideas.
May 2022:
Received a National Endowment for the Humanities Planning Grant for “The Wayfinder Project: Revealing Black Print Culture to a Linked World, 1830-.”
October 2022:
Hosted a 2-day, in-person, advisory board meeting. The meeting established principles and requirements for the project and raised important questions for the project team to consider.
September 2022 – May 2023:
Created a test set of data, performed quality assurance on the data, explored Wikidata including import methods and potential queries of the data, evaluated the potential of ChatGPT for automated data extraction, evaluated the editorial process for an ongoing expansion of data identified in the document.
March & May 2023:
Hosted virtual, half-day advisory board meetings.
May – December 2023:
Continued to assess and refine the goals of the project and plan for its next phase. Sought additional feedback through conference participation.
January – May 2024:
Established teaching partnerships and explored ways to incorporate the project into the undergraduate classroom. In consultation with Sarah Salter, Director of the Writing Program at Emory University, piloted a Wayfinder Wikipedia and Wikidata class project for the seminar, Race, Gender, and Media Making. Project Team members helped to design the assignment and to provide technical and research support for students over the course of the semester.