Petitioning For Freedom

KJ Author

07/26/2021 Added

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Overview of Petitioning for Freedom in its Early Stages

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[00:00:01.030]Greetings and thank you for joining this DHS lightning talk.
[00:00:05.620]My name is Katrina Jagodinsky,
[00:00:07.420]and I am the PI on the petitioning for freedom project at the university of
[00:00:11.290]Nebraska Lincoln center for digital research in the humanities.
[00:00:14.680]Our team consists of myself along with CDRH programming and metadata staff,
[00:00:19.180]a cadre of undergraduate and graduate research assistants and a postdoc project
[00:00:23.110]manager.
[00:00:24.010]We work collectively in a public land grant institution with campuses and
[00:00:28.030]programs across the state that reside on the past present and future homelands
[00:00:32.230]of the Pawnee, Ponca, Oto-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Arapaho,
[00:00:36.820]Cheyenne, Kaw peoples and Winnebago,
[00:00:39.190]as well as the relocated Ho-Chunk Iowa and SAC and Fox peoples. Our work proceeds
[00:00:44.080]with the preservation of tribal sovereignty and indigenous reclamation in mind.
[00:00:49.240]Petitioning for freedom.
[00:00:50.200]Is a relational database and book-length project based on more than 8,000 habeas
[00:00:54.190]Corpus petitions from black indigenous immigrant dependent and institutionalized
[00:00:58.810]petitioners over the long 19th century in six states throughout the American
[00:01:02.680]west,
[00:01:03.460]the database aims to build a demographic profile of petitioners in particular
[00:01:07.090]legal categories trace the power dynamics of the relationships between bound
[00:01:11.470]parties and those who bound them and link petitions to key areas of legal
[00:01:15.190]reform.
[00:01:16.720]These aims are linked.
[00:01:18.220]To our analytical goals.
[00:01:19.750]All of which constitute significant interventions and legal historical
[00:01:22.960]scholarship.
[00:01:24.070]We are linking thousands of previously unknown petitioners to reform in areas of
[00:01:28.540]family, federal Indian, immigration, incarceration, labor,
[00:01:31.750]and social welfare law, and policy.
[00:01:34.090]We are determining the nature of relationships between bound parties,
[00:01:37.120]those who bound them, and those who advocated for them.
[00:01:39.880]We are simultaneously identifying demographic regional and temporal trends and
[00:01:44.110]patterns of bondage. And in resistance to bondage currently,
[00:01:48.790]PFF has just completed year one of a three-year NSF grant to build a relational
[00:01:53.230]and interoperable database of petitions.
[00:01:55.690]Our grant success is based on a smaller scale pilot study of petitions at the
[00:01:59.290]page level, using TEI to identify document elements,
[00:02:02.860]named parties in their roles and temporal and regional data to accommodate the
[00:02:07.390]dramatic increase of scale. In our project,
[00:02:09.340]we are transitioning to case level data collection in a spreadsheet that
[00:02:13.030]captures citation, jurisdictional, regional demographic and relational data.
[00:02:18.160]In this transitional year,
[00:02:19.480]our team has grappled with and continues to explore a fundamental challenges
[00:02:22.960]shared by many in the DH community,
[00:02:25.030]particularly those working with legal documents and other corpora that is
[00:02:28.240]similarly constructed.
[00:02:29.920]Those that are worth a shared discussion include what is gained or lost when
[00:02:33.670]encoding at the document versus the case level.
[00:02:36.130]Should we make these choices on the basis of scale or on the basis of our
[00:02:39.430]questions?
[00:02:40.480]We have decided to use TEI at the page level for all petitions in Washington,
[00:02:44.590]as a sample set that will demonstrate the powerful yield of document level
[00:02:48.520]encoding,
[00:02:49.240]but this choice dramatically slows our progress on the case level and coding.
[00:02:53.620]What is gained or lost in building an index versus an archive of primary source
[00:02:57.400]materials that are otherwise on and under often degrading in poorly resourced
[00:03:01.870]repositories. We have mixed quality images of all of our documents,
[00:03:05.950]but are currently transcribing and coding and indexing without building an
[00:03:09.130]archive. We are concerned, however,
[00:03:11.140]that many of users of the database will likely want digital access to the
[00:03:14.740]documents themselves.
[00:03:16.570]How do we build a database of incomplete records?
[00:03:19.840]Further, what constitutes a record if the parameters of behaviors petition in the case
[00:03:23.470]are unclear because of the flimsy nature of archival practices between 1812,
[00:03:27.760]and 1924 and uneven archiving since 1924,
[00:03:32.110]many legal collections are incomplete by nature.
[00:03:34.870]This makes it impossible for us to make unqualified quantitative claims about
[00:03:38.740]our findings. Furthermore,
[00:03:40.390]local courts and clerks clerks practiced a broad range of recording
[00:03:44.800]practices and habeas petitions often coincided with additional legal actions,
[00:03:49.750]making the category of habeas petition and a court case imprecise and
[00:03:53.740]inconsistent across our multi-county and multi-state data set.
[00:03:58.060]Our team continues to unravel this problem with each new jurisdiction we bring
[00:04:02.110]into the project.
[00:04:03.820]How do we document demographic and regional data that is implied rather than
[00:04:07.420]stated, or that is unevenly reported.
[00:04:10.330]Legal records are notoriously silent archives,
[00:04:13.090]despite popular assumptions about their veracity and cohesion among other
[00:04:17.470]attributes and consistently recorded in habeas petitions are the race or
[00:04:21.040]ethnicity of all parties involved as well as their citizenship status.
[00:04:24.700]And the age of the bound party testimony is recorded in summary rather than
[00:04:29.230]verbatim. And some parties are present, but not recorded in the petitions.
[00:04:33.190]Further many petitions are themselves incomplete records.
[00:04:36.460]And for perhaps half of our collection,
[00:04:38.620]we do not know the outcome of the petition.
[00:04:40.990]Our team is exploring ways to record race, nationality, gender,
[00:04:44.320]and age in particular because of the hierarchies built around each of these
[00:04:47.800]attributes over the long 19th century,
[00:04:50.170]we are also expanding our relational categories.
[00:04:52.570]Whenever a new category emerges from the records,
[00:04:56.110]audience members surely recognize some of the DH concepts embedded in PFF
[00:05:00.010]already, but some of the most relevant are the practices and insights of data
[00:05:03.880]feminism, digital ethnic studies, relational ontologies,
[00:05:07.060]and archival access and preservation or digitization.
[00:05:10.270]We strive to make gendered and sexual hierarchies more visible in legal
[00:05:13.480]historical analysis. Despite a Corpus generated under the principles of coverture,
[00:05:17.830]which we consider the tandem application of misogyny and white supremacy.
[00:05:21.310]In this context,
[00:05:22.660]we also strive to encode the racial hierarchies embedded in seemingly race
[00:05:26.440]neutral documents.
[00:05:27.700]And this work requires extensive parallel research in archival and digital
[00:05:31.450]records with their own flaws,
[00:05:33.190]such as census vital statistics and newspaper accounts,
[00:05:36.880]and employing a relational ontology that accurately reflects the power dynamics
[00:05:40.660]among the many parties involved in habeas petitions.
[00:05:43.390]We recognize the utility of FOAF to identify stable relationships within and
[00:05:47.530]across petitions.
[00:05:48.970]But we also benefit from the no SQL approach that allows for ephemeral, coercive,
[00:05:53.110]and sometimes implied relationships. Finally,
[00:05:56.530]we benefit from archivist discussion of access and digitization as a form of
[00:06:00.530]preservation. As we consider our options in building a Corpus,
[00:06:04.010]certainly an index and possibly a digital archive of habeas petitions.
[00:06:09.410]This mixed methods project has a handful of goals that are both quantitative and
[00:06:13.040]qualitative. These are to identify an interoperable, relational schema,
[00:06:17.120]useful to digital legal scholars and others working in legal corpora use our
[00:06:21.350]data to visualize the power relations among habeas petition parties and the
[00:06:24.920]jurists who heard their claims, contextualize marginalized,
[00:06:27.980]peoples leveraging of the law to make creative and critical rights claims and to
[00:06:31.700]establish demographic regional and temporal trends among litigants that might
[00:06:35.480]otherwise go unnoticed within legal reform campaigns typically seen from the
[00:06:38.990]legislative or judicial level from the top down this project tells the
[00:06:43.790]stories of petitioners like Fannie Fowle,
[00:06:46.040]an Aboriginal woman abducted in Australia,
[00:06:48.470]shackled on a British ship that sailed to Hong Kong. Then Victoria,
[00:06:51.470]then Seattle,
[00:06:52.190]before she escaped to tell her harrowing tale and used habeas to redeem herself
[00:06:57.410]or Mary teller,
[00:06:58.340]a white migrant woman who successfully used habeas to challenge the transfer of
[00:07:02.510]her trial to a remote precinct where all male jurors would not know that she had
[00:07:07.100]spent years trying to divorce and leave her abusive husband. Frank,
[00:07:10.220]before she finally killed him in self-defense or Lucia Martinez,
[00:07:13.880]the Yaqui woman who used habeas to redeem her three and five year old daughters
[00:07:17.660]from the territorial Arizona Senator who both fathered and indentured them or
[00:07:22.070]Maddie Wells,
[00:07:22.910]the 14 year old girl who appealed to a court to redeem her from a child
[00:07:26.780]marriage.
[00:07:27.140]She and her parents did not consent to each of these gripping stories are part
[00:07:31.010]of habeas history in the American west.
[00:07:32.990]And they are among the thousands of petitions for freedom being surfaced in this
[00:07:36.410]project. Our next steps in years,
[00:07:39.020]two and three are to identify appropriate applications for our data,
[00:07:42.740]build an accessible interface for our database,
[00:07:45.410]determine our strategy for accommodating incomplete collections,
[00:07:49.130]build a network of scholars working in digital legal history and establish
[00:07:53.120]interoperable schemes that allow us to expand our project.
[00:07:56.540]Thanks to all of you for following along with this presentation,
[00:07:59.540]my work is not possible without the skilled and dedicated team of scholars
[00:08:03.020]working alongside me at UNL center for digital research in the humanities.
[00:08:07.040]I look forward to feedback from all of you,
[00:08:08.780]and I'm thankful to the DHSI team for preparing me to take on this project and
[00:08:13.490]inviting me to share it with you here.

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Petitioning For Freedom

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