Mastodawn

Michael Corey May 26, 2023

My holiday Friday news dump is that we've added several thousand mapped racial covenants to our still-in-progress Milwaukee County data set. https://github.com/UMNLibraries/mp-us-racial-covenants #racialcovenants #MappingPrejudice #milwaukee

GitHub - UMNLibraries/mp-us-racial-covenants: Mapped racial covenants, produced by Mapping Prejudice volunteers and Mapping Prejudice and collaborators nationwide.

Mapped racial covenants, produced by Mapping Prejudice volunteers and Mapping Prejudice and collaborators nationwide. - UMNLibraries/mp-us-racial-covenants

GitHub

Michael Corey Apr 28, 2023

Want to learn more about the #MappingPrejudice Deed Machine, our software platform for finding and mapping racial covenants? I'm doing an overview of the technical platform at 11 Central today for MAGIRT and the Western Association of Map Libraries. #racialcovenants https://okstate-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0oceCqrTspGtyUD4_ywZVo3gYzookzyEoT#/registration

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: MAGIRT Webinar Series: The Mapping Prejudice "Deed Machine". After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

Mapping Prejudice technical lead Michael Corey will demonstrate how a new, cloud-hosted web application has the potential to supercharge the process of mapping racial covenants, clauses that were inserted in the property record to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying certain pieces of land. Mapping Prejudice broke a long-standing research logjam when it devised a new technological platform for creating comprehensive geospatial datasets of racial covenants. In Minneapolis–where the project began at the University of Minnesota Libraries–one common restriction stipulated that the "premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent." There are millions of these racist restrictions on properties across the country. But they have been extremely difficult to document since they are buried in millions of pages of documents held by county recorders around the country, and difficult to map because historic property records are not connected to modern systems. Since 2016, the project team has been working steadily to refine its methodology, which involves Optical Character Recognition, Python scripts, crowdsourcing through Zooniverse, and automated strategies for connecting racial restrictions on historic property parcels to the modern street grid. But over the last year, the team achieved a major breakthrough when it bound these tools together in what we now call the “Deed Machine,” a cloud-hosted web application that knits together these disparate technical workflows and leverages the power of parallel computing. Corey will share the insights from this iterative process of technical experimentation. He will also explain the exciting possibilities opened up by the Deed Machine, which has the potential to help researchers across the country locate racial restrictions quickly and accurately.

Zoom