Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities, Remixing Rural Texas (RRT) is a prototype for facilitating the "remixing" of various types of digitized primary sources for Web presentations on the history of race and race relations in rural Texas. To demonstrate this tool’s potential, RRT draws from the Project Director’s (Shannon Carter) ongoing research on community writing in an isolated university town during what historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall calls "The Long Civil Rights Movement" (LCRM). The resulting project features local activism in 1967-68 (A Clear Channel) and suggests the many ways local-global forces interanimate a given literacy event. Through RRT, we offer a concrete example of the ways historically marginalized populations in under-resourced, understudied areas can change our understanding of rhetoric's past. 

A Clear Channel is a short documentary (18:16 minutes) about East Texas activism in 1967-1968, remixed from primary source materials (oral histories, images, video), native audio and video, and a range of scholarly and contemporary texts. The story features two African American undergraduate students (Joe Tave and John Carlos) and their attempts to promote racial justice in a recently desegregated community.

View

The prototype we have built is a Data Source Annotation (DSA) framework that identifies information layers not immediately obvious in the remix itself, including complete citations for all artifacts and permissions for each individual use, as well as relevant geographical (via Google Maps), temporal (interactive global-local timeline), and other contextualizing features. 

DSA Demo

About DSA