#dtrblackbrooklyn

“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.” Beloved, Morrison 190

Recently, I have been thinking of the technicalities of my project. This includes working through copyright for photos and engaging people from Brooklyn, particularly the kiddies, with Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn. I have a bunch of gracious friends and this time around, Elijah Langston ‘18 volunteered to help me think through the latter using his knowledge from working with younger children as a summer camp counselor to techniques taught in his Reading, Writing, and Teaching course here at Amherst. Alongside detailing my thesis project and interest in student involvement to administration, faculty, and parents, I also have to consider how I’d make my thesis engaging to elementary school students. So we did the hard part first—brainstormed a way to hold a 3 part series in my former public schools!

Using a ‘theory to practice’ model, this 3 part series includes two initial classes and one field work session outside of the classroom. Hopefully, this series will happen as Black History Month programming. Yes, Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are phenomenal, but I want to expand the narrative of Black History as something more relevant and closer to these students both in time and space. 

So here’s the breakdown (of the featured photo)—

1st class: lesson on tying the digital world typically consumed as entertainment to black history in Brooklyn (usually termed Social Studies as a crossover between history and humanities). hello Afrofuturism!

2nd class: exposure to photography and virtual reality/ hands on production of the digital using Google Camera and Cardboard 

3rd class: field work where students will be included in my photos series and use what they know to create their own Virtual Reality images. 

Now that I have the lesson plan, I do have to work out logistics like how long each session will be, whether they will be held during the class day or during after school, how many students I want to participate, when and how to give out permission slips/ release forms, transportation for the Saturday field work, specific places I want to visit for the field work, and the list goes on! :) But I am certainly happy with how far this brainstorming session got.

“If a house burns down, its gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world... even if I don’t think it, even if I die the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there... Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.” (Morrison 36)

Call it divine timing, mind reading, or the ghost of Beloved’s past, but whatever it is has to be the strangest, most revelatory, and incredible thing in this world. While at the Schomburg Center in Harlem working on my thesis, a fellow Amherst student, Noah Morton ‘17, accompanied me to sift through a ton of archived material. What we saw was nothing short of amazing and the conversations had about remembering these moments depicted in the photographs helped me inch closer to what I envision my thesis to be. I speak a little bit about it in my former blog post but on our walk to the train station, Noah asked whether the spirit of a space remains despite the un/intentional destruction of it. It felt like a rhetorical question, as we both had similar answers stating in different ways that yes, it must. However, it felt like a partial answer, as we based them on the fact that some archived relics or unarchived artifacts exists somewhere and is "waiting” to be found.

The images above represent parts 2 and 3 of my thesis: the photo series and virtual reality. 

This Thanksgiving Break, I spent a lot of time doing archival work for the photo series, utilizing both the digital and physical archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Quick shoutout to Noah Morton for helping me sift through 3 hours of archived photography, and asking very provocative questions about the intrinsic spirit of a space that remains despite the un/intentional destruction of it. Through this digging, I found many images like image 1, that snapshots an older Brooklyn. Many of those images actually include black people but due to copyright I won’t be able to post those until further notice. Although these were just test images for me to locate these place and try out the functionalities of the photo equipment (Samsung 360 camera, Canon EOS 7D & Google camera), I could quickly envision the actual set up for my final photos. Ideally, I would have a black Brooklyn resident hold the older image, image 1 in this case, while actually being photographed in the present location featured in image 3. That way, I represent the intergenerational presence of black people in Brooklyn. Check out that one tall building that remains standing in both of the photos!

I also spent some time creating virtual reality images. What seems more like a landscape shot in image 2 is actually a 360° virtual reality image made with the Google Cardboard Camera. I’m hoping to superimpose graphic images onto the virtual photo to represent the intergenerational presence of black people in Brooklyn, which unlike the 2D nature of photos, will have a 3D and immersive effect. Shoutouts to Irisdelia (featured at the edge of image 2) for traversing through Brooklyn to get images, problem shooting with Baby Eve (our name for the Samsung 360 camera lol), and asking thoughtful questions on the meaning and purpose of restoration. The restoration question in particular requires me to think a bit more about the term in my efforts to memorialize Brooklyn digitally, as well as understand it as a buzz word for developers that closely speaks to architectural work as opposed to historical work. 

The tour and my time at the museum has made me think constructively about what has existed and most importantly, what can be found. The inspiring and informative narrative was proof that black communities not only existed, but also were resourceful and thriving pre- and post-Civil War. Although this was only one community, there may have been many more. If not free and/ or independent communities, then black people who lived in and around Brooklyn.

Below is a timeline of dates that will definitely help me in Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn.

Timeline:

1790 Census data first recorded (census data collection actually a mandate in the Constitution) - impt for my work on GIS mapping

1863 New York Draft Riots, numerous predominately black institutions burned down

1883 Brooklyn Bridge built

1900s Lynchings at an all time high, post-Industrial Revolution

1930s Large-scale lack of funding, causing the devolution of predominately black institutions in Brooklyn

Would you check this out! Brooklyn, NY, 1910.

Some problem solving for finding the total population of Brooklyn while working on my GIS maps with an IT Specialist brought me straight to ancestry.com. I’m not completely sure why the total population was missing but Librarian Dunstan told me there might have been a fire in a building where they held census data years ago, and that could be the reason some of the information may be missing. (He wasn’t sure so I will double check that!) Regardless, we found digital copies of the 13th Census of the United States’ 1910 population. Since this is the 13th census of the US, I wonder about the availability, access and the accuracy of the earlier ones. They do bring me hope that some census data may not have been digitized, so if I search a bit more I’d have access to years prior to 1910 that could help me flesh out my GIS maps.

Such detailed information has made me consider more than a total population and generating sequences of GIS maps though. It has given me both information and hope for the photo series portion of my thesis. Although the information may not be 100% accurate, they are extremely detailed. If you look closely enough, they offer information like whether or not the person knew how to read, where their parents were from, race (white/ colored), whether they had children and how many, street names, age, and more. With this information or any other archived information for that matter, I could locate site specific places formerly inhabited by black people for my photo series that will highlight an intergenerational black presence in Brooklyn. (Examples coming soon!)

Providing motivation for the possibility and fullness of my project, this copy like other archived information I have found in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s digital archives helps me specify where certain silences lie—a silence I describe in my thesis proposal as a haunting and daunting silence that black people have both been coerced to keep and/ or have consciously decided to navigate. In reference to the silence we have been “coerced to keep,” a silence surrounding our public history, archived information provides more clarity on this silence. Now I understand that it is not a scarcity of archives of black people (hoping that is true of archives in general as I will be visiting the Schombrg Center before Thanksgiving). But that silence is particularly present in the public history production and presentation. Our history makers, whoever they are, ignore or do not show precedence for information that have chronicled black history in Brooklyn when creating public history (ie. landmarks, neighborhood and street names, literature, cityscapes, etc.) 

Here’s a very short snap of Andrew giving me a tutorial on Vuforia x Unity. It was very informative and detailed. Likewise, it made me think of the logistics of utilizing augmented reality for my thesis. 

For one, even as extensive as these two apps are, they showed very similar glitches with augmented reality applications and production as gimmicky apps like Wallame. It relies on frames so moving an object out of the frame causes the graphic overlay to phase in and out. Andrew says this can be worked out once we learn how to use 3d objects, so I’m hopeful.

Now the question I have is how do I combat the learning curve. I do not know how long it will take to learn this, have a mock up, and then work on actual memory sites in Brooklyn (very textured and large city landscapes). This is important given there is a hard and fast deadline for theses here at Amherst College. My other concern is that these memory sites may shift in the future which if it relies on a specific frame (and say a new building is built or torn down) the graphic overlay will be glitchy and potentially outdated.