But those Harris stories are just part of the picture: most of the stories that Harris collected were originally African folktales, and I want to connect Harris's stories with those African stories, along with other African American stories, both from the United States and also from the Caribbean and throughout the Americas. There is a wealth of public domain material to work with for both the African American stories and also the African stories. I am now collecting and organizing those public domain materials so that I can then create OER projects (textbooks?) where I bring together the stories from Harris's books in a larger African and African American context. Harris framed his stories in terms of sentimentalized slavery (with Uncle Remus as an "old darkey" telling stories to a much adored little white boy), but I want to try to frame the stories instead as an example of African survival and influence: although the institutions of slavery attempted to deny and destroy African culture, the African stories did survive. Hundreds of them!
So, for the first half of the summer I have been using Diigo to bookmark full-text books and the individual stories in those books. I have about 70 African books containing approximately 2500 stories, and about 40 African American books (including the Harris books) containing approximately 1500 stories, plus 10 Caribbean books containing approximately 1000 stories.
That's right: approximately 5000 stories total. And these are public domain books, meaning that the content is free to remix and reuse without restriction.
Diigo is a fantastic took for browsing and searching, and I am adding summaries to the stories that are of particular interest; so far I have over 600 stories with summaries. Diigo is not, however, a very good space for presenting texts... and that's where HAX comes in.
HAX is a content management system that is going to allow me to start reproducing public domain texts, with light editing, in my own webspace, providing a reference point that I can use as I develop future OER projects. I first learned about HAX from this article in Inside Higher Ed. As I grew more interested in HAX, I started following HAX developer Bryan Ollendyke at Twitter, and then last week I finally met him in person at Reclaim Hosting's Domains 2019 conference. Check out his presentation there: HAXTheWeb: Chaotic good.
With some help from Bryan and Tim Owens at Reclaim, I got a HAX site up and running at my lauragibbs.net domain: Story Folder.
The workflow:
1. Find a story in Diigo. I'm moving stories into HAX by selecting from stories for which I already have a summary at Diigo but which have not been HAXed:
#summary:yes NOT #hax
In particular, I'm starting with the stories collected by the Hampton Institute's folklore project and published in Southern Workman in the 1890s:
#book:DJWatersAfroAmericanHampton #summary:yes NOT #hax
I'll move on to another book when I'm done with that one.
2. Add story to spreadsheet. Like I always do, I've got a spreadsheet for the HAX site where I track my workflow. So, when I pick out a new story to do from Diigo, I add a new row to my spreadsheet.
2. Create GoogleDoc. As part of transitioning the story into HAX, I'm making GoogleDocs. This is so that in addition to the convenience of the HAX presentation, I also have the search options that I get with Google. So, I create a GoogleDoc from a template, and then I paste in the OCR of the story I've chosen, along with other bibliographical information: Google Docs HAX Folder. I then add a link to this GoogleDoc to the spreadsheet.
3. Editing in GoogleDoc. I'm going some light editing for formatting, plus I'm removing eye-dialect from the stories, with a note to that effect in the document. There's a link to the original source online for anyone who wants to compare my editing with the source version. I also give the story a more descriptive title if the original title is not clear (as is often the case).
3. Add page to HAX site. Then, I add a page to the HAX site, and I copy-and-paste the content from the GoogleDoc there. For example: Brer Fox, Brer Squirrel, and Brer Rabbit. I then add a link to this HAX site page to the spreadsheet. It takes just a minute to create this page since I'm not doing any content editing; I'm just transferring content into the page.
4. Update Diigo. I then go to the Diigo item for the story and make some adjustments:
update title to match the story title
change the Diigo link to go to the HAX page
add HAX and GDoc labels
Having those as separate labels will be useful if I run into problems with HAX. I'm just a beginner, so if I need to redo the HAX site or pause in my work there to figure something out, I can carry on with my GoogleDoc editing and then upload the content to HAX later.
Obviously having redundant information like this (story text, bibliography) is not ideal, but it's also not the end of the world, especially since these tools are serving different purposes. The GoogleDocs is purely internal for processing and also for searching later on, but I won't be doing any editing of the GoogleDocs. Instead, I will treat the HAX page as "the" text, and that's where I will be doing editing as I go along, and it is the HAX page where people will land from the Diigo links.
So, check it out: here are the stories in HAX as they appear with their summaries and tags at Diigo. Whoo-hoo! Just click on the story title there, and into HAX you will go. Now I can start building the library of stories that I need to put those Joel Chandler Harris stories in context. Let there be RABBITS! :-)
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