Dialogues in Diversity Event @ Russell Library

Dialogues in Diversity: Red and Blue, Not Just Black and White:
Politics and Diversity in Georgia
The Office of Institutional Diversity in partnership with the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies invites you to a lunchtime discussion around diversity, demographics and politics.

Demographic changes have direct implications on public policy and politics. The recent general and presidential elections highlighted changes in both the US population and the electorate. Georgia's changing demographics place the state in the forefront of anticipated changes in public policy and politics. This dialogue will provide an opportunity for faculty and staff to discuss the political implications, challenges and opportunities resulting from changing demographics nationally and within the State of Georgia.
Dr. Charles S. Bullock, III, Richard B. Russell Professor of Political Science in the department of Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs will facilitate this discussion.

Friday, April 19th from 12:00 to 1:30pm in the Richard B. Russell Building, Special Collections Libraries, Room 285

Lunch is provided and therefore prior registration is required. The series is free and spaces will be filled on a first come basis.

To register for this dialogue, please send an email with your name and department to rsvpOID@uga.edu

Sowing Success with Commissioner of Agriculture Tommy Irvin

Few people could tell us more about agriculture in Georgia than Tommy Irvin. From his humble beginnings as the son of sharecroppers in White County, Irvin would go on to become Georgia’s Commissioner of Agriculture in 1968. Maintaining this post until his retirement in 2010, he would be the longest serving agriculture commissioner in the U.S. In the opening minutes of his interview for the Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection, Irvin speaks about his qualifications for the job:

"I know when I was chosen as Commissioner of Agriculture, one of the editorial writers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wanted to know what I knew about farming.  I said, “Well, you know, I guess I knew everything that you needed to know. I knew how to tie a handspring and I knew “gee” and I knew “haw” and knew what that meant. And I knew how to keep the cow -- keep the horse from walking on the cotton when it was young and step on it. And I knew how to put on a set of Johnson wings.”  He said, “What’s that?”  I said, “Well, I thought that’s where I’d lose you!”

For the uninitiated, “gee” and “haw” are verbal commands for steering a plough horse. To learn what Johnson wings are you’ll have to check out the interview yourself (about 3 minutes in).  These tidbits may seem irrelevant and stuck in a bucolic past, but as Irvin continues about his memories and his life’s work, it becomes clear that such experiences informed the career of a statesman who shaped agriculture policy in Georgia for over forty years. And on more recent matters, Irvin is no slouch. He goes on to discuss a number of contemporary issues that affect agriculture in Georgia and beyond, including food safety, foreign trade, food prices, and the role of illegal immigration. Aside from his work with agriculture, Irvin has also been a huge advocate for education, serving on local and statewide school boards and collaborating with Richard Russell to implement the School Lunch Program. And it all started with Johnson wings.

Post by Steve Armour, Intern, Russell Library

RBRL Donor Lorena Weeks Featured in PBS Series

Russell Library donor and trailblazer for equity in the workplace, Lorena Weeks featured in new PBS series, Makers

Lorena Weeks, a native of Wadley, Georgia won a landmark sex discrimination case against Southern Bell in 1969.  Two years earlier, Weeks applied for a promotion at her longtime employer, for the position of a switchman, which promised an increase in pay and a significantly shorter commute to work. Despite her seniority with the company, she was denied the promotion because she was a woman and it was a job reserved for men.

Weeks knew about the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed by President Lyndon Johnson and felt that Southern Bell had violated her rights under the law, which specified that an employer could not discriminate on the basis of sex. Although she initially lost the case, she appealed, and with the help of National Organization of Women (NOW) attorney Sylvia Roberts, brought her case before Judge Griffin Bell in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Weeks finally won her case on appeal. She became a switchman at Southern Bell, a position she held until her retirement in 1983 after more than thirty years of service to the company.

Weeks’ shares her battle for justice along with other key people involved in the case in the new PBS Series on the Women’s Movement, Makers.  Russell staff members are delighted to see Lorena’s trailblazing efforts reach a national audience. 

“Lorena Weeks is truly one of the unknown heroes of the Women’s Movement. She is unassuming in demeanor but possesses the strong sense of right versus wrong and was unwilling to accept blatant discrimination from her longtime employer, a company for which she still expresses a loyalty today. We deeply appreciate her persistent courage to take that step forward for women,” said Russell Library Director, Sheryl Vogt.

View clip from the Makers program: http://video.pbs.org/video/2331436057/

View full interview from the Russell Library interview with Ms. Weeks:  http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/media.html#weeks

Mrs. Weeks donated her papers to the Russell Library in 2010 and they are open and available for research.  Learn more about these materials at http://russelldoc.galib.uga.edu/russell/view?docId=ead/lweeks.xml;query=;brand=default

First Person Project Day - April 19th

Join the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies for the First Person Project, a new oral history series documenting the experiences of everyday Georgians, on Friday, April 19, 2013 in the Richard B. Russell Building for Special Collections Libraries.

Six sets of partners will be accepted for this First Person Project session, scheduled for Friday, April 19th between 9:00am and 4:00pm. Each audio recording session takes one hour to complete. Photographs will also be taken for each session. The Russell Library will archive the interviews to add to its documentation of life in post 20th century Georgia and will provide participants with a free digital download of the recording and photographs. A $10 donation is suggested for each participant pair.

If you have a friend or family member with a story to tell, become a part of the First Person Project. Reservations are on a first come first serve basis and can be made by calling 706-542-5788 or registering online at http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/fpp/fpp_register.html.

For more information on this event and other upcoming First Person Project days, please email russlib@uga.edu or call (706) 542-5788.

More About the First Person Project
Modeled roughly on StoryCorps, a national initiative partnered with National Public Radio and the Library of Congress, the First Person Project is smaller in scale but similar in concept, providing tools to would-be oral history interviewers and interviewees, including tips on how to create questions and conduct interviews. The project was inspired by the belief that everyone is an eyewitness to history, and that everyone, sometimes with a little encouragement, has a story to tell.

To learn more about the Richard B. Russell Library, visit:
http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell

Spotlight on Tour at 2!

A short video spotlighting the Special Collections Building's weekly Tour at 2, which takes place every Tuesday from 2:00-3:00PM, if featured on the UGA homepage today! Check it out below.

Reflections on Reflections

My regular gig is cataloging monographs over at the UGA Main Library, but in early January I started interning here at the Russell Library to work on the Reflections on Georgia Politics Oral History Collection. It's an amazing collection of video interviews that gives researchers an in depth look at Georgia's modern political history from the people who served, or are still serving, the state.

ROGP has been through many steps since the project began in 2006. Now, I am facilitating the next phase in the process of making this collection accessible: creating finding aids for each interview.
In addition to getting some wonderful archival processing experience, I'm also getting a first class education in 20th century Georgia political history. These two aspects of the internship feed into one another, because the more familiar I become with the subject matter the better I get at creating finding aids. It's exciting to get this collection up and running because it has immense research value and the project really taps into the mission of the Russell Library. On top of that, I can now impress my friends as I confidently spout off facts about the Talmadge machine, the county unit system, the politics of school desegregation, and the rise of the Republican Party.

One of my favorite interviews I have written description for so far features Carl Sanders, Governor of Georgia from 1963 to 1967. He recalls the decision-making process surrounding the integration of UGA (Sanders was then president pro tem of the Georgia senate) and shares his views about race and politics. While UGA's integration has been written and talked about at length by a number of experts over the years, this represents one of those rare glimpses into a historic moment from someone who played a major role in the process. Check out the discussion around 19:20.

Stay tuned for more updates about Reflections on Georgia Politics!

Post by Steve Armour, Intern, Russell Library

New Developments in Oral History

Here in the Media and Oral History Unit of the Richard B. Russell Library, we spend a lot of time thinking about the best ways to make our oral history interviews available to the public. Historically, researchers relied solely on printed transcripts of oral histories, and oral historians and archivists often destroyed the original audio recordings after transcribing an interview. Transcript was king. Today, however, new technologies and the Internet make it much easier to share original media. So, while transcription is still considered the "best practice," there's a growing sentiment that actually listening to or viewing the original interview should be an integral part of interacting with oral history.

There is a lot of debate in the oral history world over the advantages and disadvantages of transcribing interviews—much of it centered on the skill and labor needed to create a quality transcript. At the Russell Library, we’ve been able to transcribe many of our interviews from the Reflections on Georgia Politics series, but we recognize that we can't do this for all of our collections.
One way we endeavor to make our interviews accessible is by posting videos on YouTube, where we hope to reach as wide an audience as possible. This morning as I was poking around our YouTube account, I noticed a small icon just above the video description. Apparently, it’s actually a Transcript option.

Figure 1: Transcript icon below the video description.

YouTube now offers a captioning or transcript option with videos uploaded to the site. They use a speech recognition and processing algorithm to actually create video transcripts from scratch.  While automated transcription is not necessarily a new development—there has been much effort over the years devoted to creating transcripts with speech recognition software—what is novel and exciting is that YouTube is creating these transcripts automatically, for all videos, and then linking the transcripts to the timecode of the interview video. So by clicking the "CC" (Closed Caption) or Transcript icons on any YouTube video, you can simultaneously watch a video and follow along in the transcript. And by clicking on a particular point in the transcript timeline, the video will skip to the corresponding segment, and vice versa.

Figure 2: Example of YouTube automated transcript.

And—even more exciting for us—YouTube will allow us to upload our own transcripts for each video.  After we upload our files, YouTube processes our transcripts with their algorithm and links the transcript to the video's timecode. This means that when you're looking at one of our Reflections on Georgia Politics YouTube videos, you can enable the transcript or closed captioning and follow along in the transcript window below the video. This might help you figure out what a narrator is saying ("what was the county, again?"), or you could do a keyword search with the ctrl + F function on your keyboard to see if a specific topic or person is mentioned. It also means that our videos are more accessible for hearing-impaired individuals.  To see a couple of examples of videos with our added transcripts, check out the Reflections on Georgia Politics interviews with Hugh Gillis and Stephanie Benfield (just click the Transcript icon to follow along).

Figure 3: Example of Russell Library Transcript on YouTube

Of course, this doesn't mean that YouTube is doing all of our work for us. We can upload the transcripts that we have, but most of our videos will only have the YouTube automated transcripts. Like most transcripts made with speech recognition software, the YouTube automated transcripts are rife with errors (at one point they transcribe "Young Harris College" as "billionaires college," at another point "you know hairs college"), while our transcripts are much more accurate—having been created and audited by multiple staff members over hundreds of hours. But at the same time automated transcripts accurately catch some important terms (apparently even YouTube usually recognizes the names "Zell Miller" or "Herman Talmadge," even when spoken in a Georgia drawl). And, as they sometimes say, something is better than nothing. For us, the automated transcripts are an unexpected bonus in our efforts to make our interviews more discoverable—and an exciting new way to allow the public to interact with oral history.

Post by Callie Holmes, Media and Oral History Archivist, Russell Library

More from First Person

In recent weeks we've been actively promoting our upcoming First Person Project day, coming up on Friday, February 8, 2013. I've received lots of calls from interested participants (yay!), many of whom have some questions about how the interview process works and how they should get started putting together questions. I wanted to take a moment here on the blog to answer some of these questions and provide a small example of the work we're doing through FPP.

When an interview pair sign up to participate in the project, they decide what roles to take on - which person will serve as the interviewer (question asker), and which one will serve as the interviewee (question answerer). I advise participants to devote some time to thinking about what stories they most want to record, and developing their questions around these central portions of the interview. Since our upcoming project day is themed around "stories of love" I've suggested thinking about those key stories that the pair want to record -- for example, if a married couple signed up and wanted to document their relationship, I might suggest that they talk about when they first met, what their first date was like, what made them decide to get married, etc. Once the ball gets rolling, they will likely have other important stories about their relationship that will emerge naturally from just the spark of these initial questions. In the end, the work of developing those questions and choosing the focus of the interview is up to the interview pair. Really, it is the relationship between the two participants -- husband and wife, father and daughter, friend and friend -- that makes the interview rich. 

This past October, we had a mother and son interview pair participate in FPP. The son wanted to interview his mother about her life and times -- childhood, marriage, family, and all the events that happened in between and around these milestones. The result was a spellbinding story, and I wanted to share just a short clip of the final product. 

In the clip below the interviewee, Marjorie, tells her son how she and her husband fell in love during World War II. A childhood friend gone to war encouraged her to write to him during his service abroad, because he was homesick. She started writing, and the letters turned into occasional phone calls and then a delivery of a box of chocolate. And then she describes the day they learned the war was over, and the moment she looked out the window and saw her future husband coming down the street to meet her.

http://podcasting.usg.edu/4DCGI/Podcasting/UGA/Episodes/26020/655511945.mp3 

I picked this small slice of an incredible interview because it resonates with our upcoming theme day "stories of love." It is just one part of a much larger story about Marjorie's life and times, but it demonstrates that even a small moment in an interview can be meaningful.  I hope you enjoy the clip, and that I'll hear more from some of you who are interested in participating in the First Person Project.

Post by Jan Levinson, Outreach Archivist, Russell Library

The Right to Choose

One of the most important figures of the 70s feminist movement may be unrecognizable by her real name.  More commonly known as “Jane Roe,” Norma McCorvey shook up the social climate of the 70s when she agreed to be a plaintiff in the landmark case Roe v. Wade.  In 1972, McCorvey filed a lawsuit claiming that Texas law criminalizing most abortions violated her constitutional rights. Setting a foundation for abortion mandates in the 30 years since the case was settled in 1973, Roe v. Wade not only argued for a woman’s right to privacy in regards to abortion, but also established a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy until the period of viability (the period when a fetus is potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, usually around 24-27 weeks).  

After having given her first two children up for adoption, McCorvey, 21, was pregnant with her third when she decided she wanted to have an abortion rather than part with another of her children.  McCorvey, according to an interview with independent news network wnd.com, was then swept up into a whirlwind of litigations after she was put into contact with two pro-abortion lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, who were looking for a pregnant mother to help them plead their case.

One of the most contentious decisions made by the court, Roe v. Wade sparked a national debate that continues today, about issues including whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in deciding the legality of abortion, and what the role religious/moral views should take in the political sphere. The case restructured national politics, dividing the country along pro-life and pro-choice lines, and formed grassroots movements on both sides.

In the decades since the case was settled, McCorvey has completely reversed her stance on abortion and joined the pro-life movement.  Although her opinion in the 70s was enough to dictate how much control any American woman could have over her body, her voice is now just one among a sea of activists in the tumultuous debates over women’s rights and abortion.

During this most recent election cycle, abortion joined topics like the economy and unemployment as one of the weightiest issues that affected voters’ choices.  As recently as October 2012, polls of female voters in swing states—a coveted demographic for both candidates—indicated that though women were equally concerned as men about broad-reaching issues like the economy and unemployment, they considered abortion the most important issue for women, by a wide margin.

A mid-2011 Gallup poll acted as a Litmus test for people’s reactions to various abortion restrictions, many that have become major issues closer to the election cycle. Of the abortion restrictions tested in the poll, informing women of certain risks of an abortion in advance was the most widely favored, at 87%. Seven out of ten Americans favored establishing a full-day waiting period for women seeking abortions, while nearly two-thirds favored making the specific procedure known as "partial birth abortion" illegal.

On the other hand, more extreme measures failed to receive broad public support. Almost 60% of people opposed eliminating funds to organizations who offer abortion services, which was particularly pertinent after Presidential candidate Mitt Romney proposed eliminating funding to Planned Parenthood and overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Romney campaign asserted its anti-abortion stance, though Romney also said he would be willing to compromise in circumstances of rape, incest, or danger to the mother.  Once early voting began, pro-choice activists became even more vocal on the dangers they foresee for women if Romney was elected. 

A recent New York Times editorial suggested that overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling would be relatively easy if a Republican won the presidency. Four of the justices are now over 70, and if one of them retired and was replaced by a more socially conservative justice, pro-choice options could be phased out completely.  Then, the article suggests, the nation’s abortion policy would revert to the pre-Roe v. Wade era, when abortion was illegal in many states. Some states that already held certain bans on abortion could then extend their rights and completely prohibit abortions.

The 2011 poll also indicates a divide on whether healthcare providers and pharmacists should be allowed to opt out of providing services/drugs that could result in an abortion. 46% of people polled said they would favor giving healthcare providers a choice, in contrast with 51% who said that health care providers should provide those services no matter what.  

This issue came to a head with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, whose “preventive services” mandate maintains that religious institutions must offer affordable healthcare services for their employees, even if these services cover reproductive rights—including birth control, abortion, and sterilization—that a religious organization opposes. The Affordable Care Act waged a war between the government and bishops/clergymen arguing that their religious freedom under the first amendment was under attack. The Catholic Church often formed the hub of debates on reigning social issues such as reproductive rights under the healthcare act and gay marriage.

Recently, pro-life supporters have formed a new argument to pledge to the Supreme Court.  Supporters have pushed a personhood clause, which would attribute “legal personhood” to a fetus, equating the life of a fetus to the life of any other child/person.  If the Supreme Court accepted this new definition of personhood, the ruling would affect any other abortion legislation, perhaps defining abortion as an act of manslaughter.

Do you think Norma McCorvey had any idea that the abortion debate would still be so highly debated more than thirty years after her case was filed?

Post by Lori Keong, student worker/blogger, Russell Library

Community Concern Gathering: Give Us Your 2 Cents!

How should we build a strong vibrant community?
What are the challenges to achieving this goal?  

On Tuesday, February 12th the Russell Forum for Civic Life in Georgia invites you to participate in a community forum to share ideas and concerns about how communities work (and don’t work) together to tackle tough public issues. Trained, nonpartisan moderators will guide the forum discussion.  The ideas gathered during the program, along with others happening around the country, will inform the development of a new National Issues Forums discussion guide that  will offer commonsense approaches  to transcending partisanship, breaking gridlock, and finding common ground  at the community level.

When: February 12, 2013, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Where: Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries, Second Floor, Rm. 285 
Contact: Jill Severn Director, Russell Forum for Civic Life in Georgia at 706-542-5766.

This program is free and open to the public. The Russell Forum for Civic Life in Georgia is the civic engagement program of the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies.