Hidden Archives: Race, Gender, and Religion in UCSB’s Ballitore Collection

FAIN: AC-277694-21

University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)
Rachael Scarborough King (Project Director: July 2020 to July 2024)
Danielle L. Spratt (Co Project Director: December 2020 to July 2024)

A two-year project on the digitization and examination of abolitionist materials to be included in experiential learning and curriculum development.

Hidden Archives is a collaborative project between the University of California, Santa Barbara, California State University-Northridge, and Howard University that digitizes and researches a collection of abolitionist materials held at UCSB while introducing underrepresented students to archival research and the digital humanities. Although both archival and digital skills are necessary to address crucial topics regarding the history of race, enslavement, and protest, the fields of book history and the digital humanities remain exclusionary to scholars of color. Hidden Archives addresses such concerns through collaborative research between faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students. The project focuses on the Ballitore Collection, a group of 18th- and 19th-century Quaker materials. By examining the collection with a diverse research team, we make it available for scholars, students, and the public while shaping a generation of researchers attuned to questions of power and absence.

Associated Products

Digital Humanities, the Ballitore Project and Antiracist Pedagogy (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Digital Humanities, the Ballitore Project and Antiracist Pedagogy
Author: Danielle Spratt
Author: Deena Al-halabieh
Abstract: tk
Date: 11/6/2020
Conference Name: Danielle Spratt

Printing and Digitizing: Historical Recreation in the Ballitore Project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Printing and Digitizing: Historical Recreation in the Ballitore Project
Author: John Henry Merritt
Abstract: This paper explores how historical recreation, particularly with handpress printing, can help us understand our own multi-/remediated era and new scholarly techniques in the digital humanities. We draw from our work with graduate and undergraduate students from UCSB, Cal State-Northridge, and Howard University on the Ballitore Project, a research initiative that brings together archival and digital methods to study the Ballitore Collection, an archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century correspondence held at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections. The project’s summer internship involves students from the three campuses working at UCSB to learn skills in topic modeling and network analysis in order to visualize the archival materials in new ways. At the same time, they use the pull press housed in UCSB’s Maker Lab to print a poem from the collection, which was originally assembled by the Anglo-Irish author Mary Leadbeater. Many of Leadbeater’s poetry drafts are stored in the collection; in order to print them, students must make decisions about which versions to use and how to deal with erratic line breaks and inconsistent spelling. This process helps us understand the history of printing, in which eighteenth-century compositors would have to make similar decisions when setting Leadbeater’s poems. But more importantly, it helps us think about processes of remediation and what is gained and lost not only in transforming manuscripts into print, but also in digitizing historical manuscripts and printed books. It reveals how Leadbeater did not see print as the apotheosis of her literary practice, but rather as one stage of production that would often be amended or superseded by later manuscript work. The process of setting type and printing reveals the multimedia nature of Leadbeater’s authorial approach, of her initial archiving of the materials in the Ballitore Collection, and of the present-day process of digitization and computational analysis.
Date: 3/11/2023
Primary URL: https://www.asecs.org/_files/ugd/acf0d2_452f261189d94eb4b4588436648e196f.pdf
Conference Name: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Ballitore Project Gender Study (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Ballitore Project Gender Study
Author: Deborah Gordon
Abstract: The Ballitore Project is an ongoing study of the Quakers in Ballitore, Ireland, during the late eighteenth century. Interns for the project transcribe the letters of these Quakers and study the context behind their religion and culture. This past summer, I–along with three other interns–presented a network analysis on those letters, which focused on the demographics of both the letter writers and recipients. In my portion of the Ballitore Quaker network analysis, I discuss the gender and religion demographic in the Ballitore letters. For example, I come to the conclusion that Richard Shackleton, a prominent religious leader in the Ballitore letters, corresponded with a fairly equal number of both men and women because of his religious mentorship towards both sexes.
Date: 2/17/2023
Primary URL: https://wsecs2023.wordpress.com/program/
Conference Name: Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Care Across Borders in Digital Scholarly Editions (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Care Across Borders in Digital Scholarly Editions
Author: Rachael Scarborough King
Author: Danielle Spratt
Abstract: Recent work in archival studies and bibliography has emphasized how an ethics-of-care framework can help us make sense of the temporal, geographical, and sociological dislocations involved with reading correspondence, journals, and other primary sources from earlier periods. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor call for a shift in scholarly models “from one based on individual rights to a model based on a feminist ethics of care.” This presentation will discuss a project that seeks to put into practice ethics of care in a collaborative project building a digital scholarly edition of archival materials. The Ballitore Project, a collaboration between UCSB, CSUN, and Howard University, investigates an archive of 18th- and 19th-century Irish Quaker correspondence held at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections. While the Ballitore Quakers were a small, provincial community—and the collection itself centers on the close-knit Shackleton family—they engaged political causes such as abolitionism, but this was a paternalistic abolitionism that entirely excluded Black voices from their correspondence. In the process of creating a digital edition of the collection for public access, the Ballitore Project seeks to address such absences by foregrounding collaborative, non-hierarchical research teams that draw from racially and socioeconomically diverse students and that cross the borders between campuses, between faculty, student, and librarians, and between pedagogy and research. The collaboration has also recently grown to include the public through the use of the Zooniverse platform for crowd-sourcing transcriptions. A care framework helps us address the problems and contradictions within the collection while valuing Quaker ideals of egalitarianism both in the past and present.
Date: 1/6/2023
Primary URL: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2023/meetingapp.cgi
Conference Name: Modern Language Association Annual Meeting

Circulating Abolition in Romantic-Era Quakerism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Circulating Abolition in Romantic-Era Quakerism
Author: Rachael Scarborough King
Author: Deena Al-halabieh
Abstract: One of the Romantic period’s most significant and prominent public rhetorical campaigns was that of the abolitionist campaign, which emerged in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century with a focus on ending the trade in enslaved humans. Quakers have been credited with an outsized role in the effort, as they represented nine out of the twelve founding members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. But at the same time, Quaker abolitionism was often not antiracist, with many Quakers advocating “repatriation” for formerly enslaved people. This paper will take a book historical approach to such contradictions using the materials of the Ballitore Collection, an archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish Quaker materials held at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections. The collection shows how Quakers outside London created consensus around abolitionism, as they circulated letters with excerpts from the correspondence of other prominent Quakers—such as Edward Rushton and John Woolman—advocating for abolition. For example, in 1807, Samuel Haughton sent his friend Mary Leadbeater a letter in which he excerpted a separate letter from Rushton to John Hancock in which Rushton noted, “I wish politicians & philosophers would learn to be consistant Jefferson the president of the united states, the freest country in the world, holds hundreds of his fellow creatures in a state of bondage, and Horne Tooke the celebrated English patriot is an enemy to the abolition of the slave trade” [sic]. In this way, individual correspondents developed a communal approach to abolitionism, which became a central part of Quaker identity. However, the Ballitore Collection shows how Quakers were not concerned to include Black people in their movement—there are no Black voices in the collection and all of the materials about abolitionism are from a white perspective.
Date: 10/20/2022
Primary URL: https://icr2022.squarespace.com
Conference Name: International Conference on Romanticism

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