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The exhibition, "And The Struggle Continues: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Fight For Social Change," which was curated by Carol Anderson, Michael Ra-Shon Hall and Sarah Quigley, is on display now through December 1 in the Schatten Gallery which is located on Level 3 of the Robert W. Woodruff Library. Below is the curator's statement included in the exhibition.

AND THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES highlights the efforts of one of the most important human rights organizations to challenge the oppressive political and economic systems of the 20th century.

Based on the extensive Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) records housed in Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, the exhibition reveals how SCLC exposed and transformed a status quo that allowed millions to suffer from poverty, environmental degradation, health care disasters, hunger, homelessness, disfranchisement, and a brutal criminal justice system. It waged these battles on a political terrain that had been fundamentally altered since the organization was created in 1957. 

The exhibition picks up the story of SCLC eleven years after it was founded to "redeem the soul of America." By 1968 Congress had finally passed landmark legislation on civil rights, voting, and housing. The visible markers of "white only" and "colored" were coming down. But the reality of poverty, inadequate schools, a Jim Crow justice system, and discrimination in housing and employment continued to dominate the lives of millions. With the assassination of its iconic leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., the question soon became how SCLC could mount an even more complex campaign for justice and equality, especially with the Nobel Peace Prize winner no longer at the helm.

The decision to take on the larger human rights agenda of jobs, housing, and health care — while shoring up the still-precarious civil rights victories of the 1950s and '60s — is the essence of this exhibition. During the movement, SCLC's nonviolent tactics had required the discipline of the protesters — often ministers, teachers, students, and other well-dressed icons of respectability — and a readily identifiable enemy — racist sheriffs unleashing German shepherds or bullwhips on unarmed citizens. Yet by the late 1960s, both of those pillars had crumbled. Overt racism had been discredited; still, the forces that maintained inequality were as powerful as Jim Crow but more elusive and harder to define and identify. In addition, those who felt the brunt of continued inequality did so without the shield of respectability to garner public sympathy and outrage. Poor, incarcerated, or afflicted with HIV/AIDS, they found themselves instead consigned to the "unworthy."

Another factor that hampered SCLC's ongoing quest for equality was a nation intent on "moving on." Unequal schools, impoverished neighborhoods, and scarce job opportunities were now no longer considered to be the result of years of discrimination and public policy but the culmination of a "culture of poverty" and an individual's bad decisions. In the process, the United States' responsibility for nearly 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow faded from the public consciousness. In addition, as apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, the pursuit of international human rights required organizational nimbleness to deal with the complications inherent in global economics and politics.

SCLC's answer, as AND THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES suggests, was not to shy away, collapse, or rest on its laurels. Instead, it faced these challenges with an unshakable belief in the power of God and the church — and the courage to be on the right side of justice.

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Emory Woodruff Library’s DiSC and Beck Center team up. 

Today we mark the birthday of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, by announcing an exciting new initiative among two distinct facets of Emory Woodruff Library. The Digital Scholarship Commons and Beck Center are teaming up to bring attention the amazing digital resources the university has to offer. Both units are charged with handling a critical piece of Emory’s digital projects but this is the first time that these separate entities have been united in cause.
 
The Beck Center curates digital library collections and works to create electronic text resources of historic and fragile documents. It has digitized 57 full text sermons given on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination which live in the collection, The Martyred President: Sermons Given on the Occasion of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The collection is just one of many that the Beck Center has created. In thinking about ways to best highlight the collection and the generative possibilities of digital humanist inquiry, the graduate fellows of DiSC, Sarita Alami, Moya Bailey, and Katie Rawson, along with Sara Palmer in the Beck Center, are working to create visualizations of the themes represented in the sermons. Using digital tools like Voyant, Viewshare, and MALLET, the DiSC/Beck Collaborators hope to pique interest in the collection by highlighting possible sites of further inquiry for interested scholars and the public.
 
We will unveil our work Friday, February 22, in anticipation of the Academy Awards on Sunday, where the film Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg, is up for twelve awards. Impress your friends at your Oscar party with your knowledge of rhetorical strategies employed by preachers in the wake of President Lincoln’s untimely demise.

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The Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University is pleased to contribute digitized versions of over 180 titles selected from our Historical Collection to the Medical Heritage Library. Many scholars find these additions valuable for learning and research. Individual volumes in DiscoverE will include a link to these volumes.

Our collection contains classics of medicine such as a 1785 edition of William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, Richard Bright’s three-volume work Reports of Medical Cases, an 1835 edition of the Works of John Hunter, an 1848 edition of John Eberle’s work on Diseases of Children, volumes from the 3rd edition and 4th edition (corrected) of Benjamin Bell’s A System of Surgery, and the first volume of a 1751 edition of Herman Boerhaave’s Praelectiones academicae in proprias Institutiones rei medicae. The collection also includes 18th and 19th century works on pathology, human anatomy, surgery and midwifery.

Lesser-known authors are also represented in the collection, including works on 19th century medical photography by George Henry Fox and L.B.V. Wooley, and publications on alternative medical practices, including homeopathy, hydropathy, the movement cure, and phrenology. The collection also includes works published in the U.S. South, such as the 1844 edition of Simon B. Abbott’s The Southern botanic physician, and Georgia author Seaborn Freeman Salter’s 1883 version of Principles and practice of American medicine and surgery.

Many thanks to the Digital Curation Center at Woodruff Library for digitizing these materials and uploading them to the Internet Archive.  Particular thanks goes to Bonnie Jean Woolger, who handled the digitization and processing of the digital files and to Matt Miller, at Health Sciences, who assessed and prepared the collection for digitization.

by Chris Palazzolo, Head of Collection Management

New Orleans Lexicon, Jill Timm

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To commemorate Fat Tuesday, I want to highlight an artist's book in MARBL, Jill Timm's New Orleans Lexicon. Timm, who got her start making miniature books, created New Orleans Lexicon after visiting the city to attend a Conclave of the Miniature Book Society. The book is 2.25 inches tall and about 3 inches wide. It does not resemble a book so much as a case with twelve folders in the Mardi Gras colors. Ten of these folders contain cards with definitions of words and phrases commonly used in the Crescent City. Each card also has a photograph or illustration made from plastic, cutouts, feathers, and beads. MARBL has one of only 25 copies of this book. New Orleans Lexicon was published under Mystical Places Press, which Timm established in 1998. MARBL possesses over thirty of Timm's books, many of them exquisite and beautiful miniatures.

New Orleans Lexicon will be a part of The Artists' Books Showcase, a digital exhibition highlighting pieces in MARBL's vast collection of artists' books. The exhibition is expected to go live in the spring of 2013.

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Mini-conference with Nello Cristianini and Roberto Franzosi

Automatic Discovery of Patterns in Media Content
Nello Cristianini, University of Bristol, UK

What can we learn about the world (and the media system) by analyzing millions of news articles or tweets? Media content analysis has historically been the domain of the social sciences, but recently we are witnessing a strong trend towards the automation of many tasks, paving the way for a new – computational – approach to social science and the humanities. In this talk, I will survey the results obtained over the past 5 years at the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of Bristol, in the area of automating the analysis of news media content. By combining techniques from machine translation, pattern recognition, statistical learning, information retrieval, I will analyze patterns connected to the past US Presidential Elections, to UK public opinion, and to EU cultural biases.

The Social Scientist, the Word, and the World:
What the Words Tell Us about Italian Fascism(1919–1922) and Georgia Lynchings (1875–1930)
Roberto Franzosi, Emory University

The talk illustrates a quantitative social science approach to texts developed by the author, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). QNA relies on computer-assisted story grammars to analyze narrative, where a story grammar is the simple Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure. In narrative, Subjects are typically social actors – individuals, groups, organizations – Verbs are actions, and Objects are both social actors and physical and abstract objects. To each of the three SVO components one can add several attributes to capture the complexity of stories (e.g., name of an individual, number of actors in a group, time and space of action). The talk will illustrate the power of the approach using data collected by the author from newspapers on the rise of Italian fascism (1919–1922) (300,000 SVOs) and Georgia lynchings (1875–1930) (7,000 SVOs). It will show how narrative data lend themselves to cutting-edge tools of data visualization and analysis as network graphs and maps in Google Earth and other GIS software. It will also show how QNA data provide the basis for fascinating digital humanities projects.

Conference Co-sponsors:
The Hightower Fund | The Department of Sociology | The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Digital Scholarship Commons |  The Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods | The Emory College Language Center
The Graduate School of Liberal Arts  |  The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry