'Digital database captures voices from inside America's prisons' (Article)
Title: 'Digital database captures voices from inside America's prisons'
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: On the effects of public policy statements, regarding criminal justice, on the mental health of incarcerated people. Includes samples from The American Prison Writing Archive
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://theconversation.com/digital-database-captures-voices-from-inside-americas-prisons-81058
Access Model: open access
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: The Conversation. (NB: This article was picked up by the AP wire service and reposted in on-line magazine and newspapers across the country.)
Publisher: TheConversation.com
"The Echoing Silence: Who Will Speak for Prison Workers?" (Article)
Title: "The Echoing Silence: Who Will Speak for Prison Workers?"
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: This article contrasts the rich history of writing by incarcerated Americans with the dearth of writing by prison workers. The article points to the debilitating physical and mental hazards of prison work and suggests that, by writing about their experience, prison workers might help themselves in relieving the stress of their jobs.
Year: 2017
Primary URL Description: http://www.aca.org/ACA_Prod_IMIS/ACA_Member/Publications/Corrections_Today_Magazine/ACA_Member/Publications/CT_Magazine/CorrectionsToday_Home.aspx?hkey=08c84ce7-094c-4ae8-836d-d43cd22c656f
Access Model: open access to previous issues
Format: Magazine
Periodical Title: Corrections Today
Publisher: Corrections Today, the publication of the American Correctional Association
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: This paper traces the history of The American Prison Writing Archive, from a writing workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility, to a book project, to the APWA's surpassing 1,000 posted essays. The panel was on teaching with archives.
(This was an oral presentation with PowerPoint; no URL.)
Date: 11/10/17
Conference Name: The American Studies Association Conference
The American Prison Writing Archive at Hamilton College (Blog Post)
Title: The American Prison Writing Archive at Hamilton College
Author: Janet Simons and Doran Larson
Abstract: Description of The American Prison Writing Archive
Date: 12/11/17
Primary URL: http://lacol.net/category/partners/hamilton-college/
Primary URL Description: Hamilton College page on Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning (LACOL) web site. Founded in 2014, the Consortium is a partnership of eleven private liberal arts colleges, including Hamilton College--the institutional home of the APWA.
Secondary URL: http://lacol.net/about-the-consortium/
Secondary URL Description: Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning (LACOL) web site. Founded in 2014, the Consortium is a partnership of eleven private liberal arts colleges.
Blog Title: The American Prison Writing Archive at Hamilton College
Website: Lacol
The American Prison Writing Archive (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The American Prison Writing Archive
Author: Doran Larson, Kathleen Kwasniewski, William Rasenberger
Abstract: History and discussion of, and transcription session for, The American Prison Writing Archive.
Date: 04/21/18
Primary URL: http://wordpress.lehigh.edu/odh2018/schedule/
Primary URL Description: http://apw.dhinitiative.org/
Conference Name: Our (Digital) Humanity; LeHigh University
The American Prison Writing Archive (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The American Prison Writing Archive
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: Introduction to, history, and aims of The APWA.
Date: 06/12/18
Primary URL: http://dhsi.org/schedule.php
Primary URL Description: Program Schedule of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the University of Victoria, Canada. June 4-18, 2018.
Secondary URL: http://apw.dhinitiative.org/
Secondary URL Description: Search page of The American Prison Writing Archive
Conference Name: Digital Humanities Summer Institute; Universiyy of Victoria, BC, Canada
“Prison Writing Instruction and the American Prison Writing Archive.” (Article)
Title: “Prison Writing Instruction and the American Prison Writing Archive.”
Author: Sean Moxley-Kelly
Abstract: This essay, in a larger collection, describes the beneficial potential for using the American Prison Writing Archive in prison teaching.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/spring-2018/prison-pedagogies.html
Primary URL Description: Syracuse University Press website page for:
Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers.
Edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson
Secondary URL: http://www.facebook.com/AmericanPrisonWritingArchive/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel
Secondary URL Description: Facebook page for The American Prison Writing Archive; includes a posting about this publication.
Access Model: Book purchase
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Book: Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers.
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Article)
Title: Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: American Quarterly (AQ) is the publication of The American Studies Association. This 1,000-word abstract describes The American Prison Writing Archive, its process and intent, for a special issue of AQ on Digital Humanities work in American Studies.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/39105
Primary URL Description: URL for Volume 70, Number 3, September 2018, of American Quarterly.
Access Model: Open
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Quarterly
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Introduction to The American Prison Writing Archive (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Introduction to The American Prison Writing Archive
Abstract: General introduction to the APWA: history, development, search capacities, hands-on search time, discussion. For students and faculty in Sociology.
Author: Doran Larson
Date: 10/01/2018
Location: California State University San Marcos. San Marcos, California
Introduction to The American Prison Writing Archive (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Introduction to The American Prison Writing Archive
Abstract: History of and introduction to the APWA.
Lecture for students and Faculty in Criminal Justice.
Author: Doran Larson
Date: 10/10/2018
Location: California State University San Marcos. San Marcos, California
Prison Witness and the Humanities (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Prison Witness and the Humanities
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: History of and Introduction to the APWA for panel audience at the National Humanities Alliance Conference, New Orleans, LA.
Date: 11/10/18
Primary URL: https://www.nhalliance.org/2018_national_humanities_conference
Primary URL Description: Website for the National Humanities Alliance Conference, New Orleans, LA. 2018
Conference Name: National Humanities Alliance Conference, 2018
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Abstract: History of the APWA, and lecture on prison witness in the digital age, attending to the technical and ethical challenges of building an on-line archive of prison witness.
Author: Doran Larson
Date: 11/12/18
Location: Loyola University, New Orleans.
Primary URL: http://www.loyno.edu/news/story/2018/11/7/4161
Primary URL Description: Advertisement for public lecture sponsored by the University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Departments of Criminology & Justice, English, and History, as well as the University’s Kendall Daigle Memorial Endowment.
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Abstract: History of and Introduction to the APWA. Two-hour lunch-time talk with faculty and digital humanities staff regarding the APWA and furthering solicitation of essays in Louisiana prisons.
Author: Doran Larson
Date: 11/14/18
Location: Newcomb College of Tulane University. New Orleans, LA.
Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: The American Prison Writing Archive (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: The American Prison Writing Archive
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: History of the APWA and discussion of the ethical and logistical considerations surrounding a digital archive of prison witness.
Date: 11-16-18
Primary URL: https://www.luc.edu/mmla/convention/
Primary URL Description: Website of the Mid-West Modern Language Association, with links to annual conference information. Kansas City, MO.
Conference Name: Mid-West Modern Language Association Conference, 2018
Digital Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: Prison Testimony and the Ethics of Textual Analysis (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Digital Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration: Prison Testimony and the Ethics of Textual Analysis
Abstract: In his talk, Larson describes the history of the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), as well as the potential and the challenges of using data-mining techniques to analyze the contents of the archive. Larson will be joined by intern Will Rasenberger, who is also a member of the APWA team.
Author: Doran Larson
Date: 2/7/19
Location: DePaul University - Chicago. Studio CHI
Primary URL: http://http://events.depaul.edu/event/doran_larson_american_prison_writing_archive#.XGb4VH5Omu4
Primary URL Description: DePaul Events calendar.
Teaching Prisoners, Teaching Publics, and the Hands-on Work of Transcribing Prison Texts. (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Teaching Prisoners, Teaching Publics, and the Hands-on Work of Transcribing Prison Texts.
Abstract: This was a workshop that, first, described the history and aims of the APWA. Will Rasenberger spoke about his work as an APWA intern. Participants were then able to transcribe hand-written APWA essays.
Author: Doran Larson and Will Rasenberger (APWA intern)
Date: 2/7/19
Location: DePaul University - Chicago. Studio CHI
Primary URL: http://las.depaul.edu/centers-and-institutes/studio-chi/Pages/news-events.aspx
Primary URL Description: Events calendar for Studio CHI
Prison Witness: A Working Introduction to The American Prison Writing Archive (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Prison Witness: A Working Introduction to The American Prison Writing Archive
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is a digital platform for non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside. It seeks to disaggregate this population into singular minds and ideas. Narratives of the human costs of incarceration enable and invite humanists—with their highly nuanced methods of critical reading—to help counter the ‘big data’ approach to carceral statehood with an unfolding of big narrative witness. In the 2,500,000+-word APWA, academic commitment to both professional scholarship and public activism can join in a project that removes scholars from the roles of leading voices and into the work of secondary witnesses facilitating the labor of the organic intellects now burgeoning at the receiving end of law’s violence. This capacity will be put into (preliminary) practice in real time among audience members.
The paper will begin with a five-minute PowerPoint history of the analog inception and into-digital growth of the APWA. It will then lead the audience through the basic search facets of the archive, asking readers to focus on essays by incarcerated women of color (nb: i-phones are adequate for this work). After a few minutes given to reading among these essays, the session will enter open discussion of what readers have found; stepping off from this discussion, the presenter will conclude by suggesting ways to curate and make critical use of prison witness more generally.
Date: 3/23/19
Primary URL: http://lawculturehumanities.com/overview
Primary URL Description: Website for 2019 conference of the Society for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities
Conference Name: 2019 conference of the Society for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. Ottawa, Ontario
Digital Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Digital Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: This paper will briefly review the inception and analog-into-digital growth that prison writers forced into being in the APWA; it will address the status of “witness literature” in an era of both mass incarceration and the digital means to make such witness accessible to a global readership.. Even as it disaggregates a mass population into singular voices, hearts and minds, the essays in the APWA reveal larger patterns in prison witness. In 1982, legal scholar Robert Cover observed that the law establishes and maintains its authority on the basis of its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence and the suffering threatened and delivered by such violence. The APWA’s writers reveal Cover’s unwritten corollary: We cannot know the full human cost or the moral status of any legal state without human witness to the depth and manner of suffering meted out by such violence. This paper will discuss the ethics of managing the APWA and of early work on text analysis, describing decisions to bracket all editorial intervention, subordinating the scholar, digital humanist, and data miner to the roles of facilitators of the unregulated interface of prison testimony and global readers.
Date: 7-16-19
Primary URL: http://elo2019.ucc.ie/
Primary URL Description: Website of the 2019 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Cork, Ireland.
Conference Name: 2019 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Cork, Ireland
Reading Ourselves in Prison Witness: Defeated Purposes, Expanding the Circle of Responsibility. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Reading Ourselves in Prison Witness: Defeated Purposes, Expanding the Circle of Responsibility.
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: This paper draws on passages from the APWA in which incarcerated people describe the experience of seeing their personalities so changed by incarceration that the notion that incarceration is effectively retributive is placed in doubt. Retribution assumes that the same person who was convicted of a crime persists inside carceral institutions. If this continuum is broken, the retributive rationale may also break down.
Date: 11/15/19
Primary URL: http://www.luc.edu/mmla/
Primary URL Description: Website of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Conference Name: Midwestern Modern Language Association
Writing Resistance, Writing the Self: Literary Reconstruction in United States Prison Witness (Article)
Title: Writing Resistance, Writing the Self: Literary Reconstruction in United States Prison Witness
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: Based in testimony from the APWA, this article argues that incarceration can so completely degrade human personality that even prison witness documenting that degradation constitutes the beginning of the ability to reconstitute the self.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9431?lang=en
Primary URL Description: Site of the on-line journal. An analog version is published as well.
Secondary URL: https://journals.openedition.org/rccs/9840
Secondary URL Description: Direct link to article.
Access Model: open
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Revista Critica de Ciencias Sociais
Publisher: University of Coimbra, Portugal
From Witness to Archive: The Ethics of Digitizing First-Person Prison Testimony (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: From Witness to Archive: The Ethics of Digitizing First-Person Prison Testimony
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is the largest and first fully searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside. The APWA currently hosts 2,168 essays, or over 2.8 million words of direct prison witness. This is a word count equal to one quarter of the entire known corpus of slave narrative; the APWA echoes that corpus by bringing first-person voices forward to resist constructed misrepresentation of the subjects of an institution committed to legally sanctioned violence. Like slave narrators, authors in the APWA help us to measure and thus to ask (again), What is the cost in human suffering of the current legal order?
This paper will briefly review the creation of an analog collection project that evolved into the APWA when essays kept coming after the deadline, forcing a break beyond analog print and onto a digital platform. The paper will point to the ethical implications of clicking onto scanned pages composed by writers who testify to the human experience of the gravitational center of the law’s violence, the center of the same legal horizon upon which the reader sits and that is revealed by reading prison witness. It will also address an ethical hazard raised by digital methods: The APWA’s scale, addressed with computational aids, makes it possible to atomize and re-datify the work of writers seeking to extract themselves—as individuals with full human dignity—from among the data piles of social science and the mass-scale prison. Drawing upon graphic models offered by Darwin and Koebler—by way of Franco Moretti—the paper will describe a text analysis plan that both respects the integrity of each prison witness, and helps readers understand that these are witnesses who speak for the silenced inside the mass prison.
Date: 5-29-20
Primary URL: https://lawandsociety.site-ym.com/default.aspx
Primary URL Description: virtual conference home page: 2020 Law & Society Association Conference
Conference Name: Law & Society, 2020
Beyond Transition or Reform: The Prison Witness as Agent of Transformational Justice (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Beyond Transition or Reform: The Prison Witness as Agent of Transformational Justice
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: No one knows law’s violence like those on its receiving end, yet imprisoned people have typically served merely as objects of socio-legal study. This paper argues for adoption of broad-scale, first-person prison witness as the primary map for a transformative justice seated in prison-born clarifications of what constitutes the human. U.S. prisons are de facto extra-legal spaces, nearly immune to legal rules or accountability. Those who witness penal practice know just how ineffective legal remedies are in penetrating prison walls. They are thus singularly situated to chart extra-legal paths to fully humane conceptions of justice as evidenced by first-person testimony from U.S. prisons and other carceral sites.
In their essay on transformative justice, Paul Gready and Simon Robins write, “A transformative approach will need to be context dependent, driven by the local and particular understandings of rights in any context and consider the diversity of understandings that might exist. It will challenge a purely normative approach with a base of evidence” (Gready and Robins 2014, 344). The primary base of evidence for this paper is The American Prison Writing Archive, a digital archive of (to date) 2,776 essays authored by 1,075 currently and formerly incarcerated people writing about their experience inside. The paper argues that written resistance to carceral quarantine and censorship, in clarifying the minimum-without-which discursive status falls short of the fully human, sets the grounds for transformation of our notions of multiple forms of justice.
Date: 05/28/2021
Primary URL: https://lawandsociety.site-ym.com/news/news.asp?id=522961
Primary URL Description: Site of the Law and Society, 2021, Conference
Conference Name: Law and Society
Prison Witness, Prison Resistance: Working with The American Prison Writing Archive. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Prison Witness, Prison Resistance: Working with The American Prison Writing Archive.
Author: Doran Larson
Abstract: The American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is a fully-searchable digital platform for non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside. The Archive seeks to disaggregate this population into singular minds and ideas; at the same time, among the 3,054 posted essays, broad patterns that bind today’s prison writing into a national witness literature are apparent. Narratives of the human costs of incarceration help counter the ‘big data’ approach to carceral statehood with an unfolding of big narrative witness. In the APWA, academic commitment to both professional scholarship and public activism can join in a project that removes scholars from the roles of leading voices and into the work of secondary witnesses facilitating the labor of the organic intellects now burgeoning at the receiving end of law’s violence and offering discursive resistance to carceral state censorship. This capacity will be put into (preliminary) practice in real time among audience members.
The paper will begin with a five-minute PowerPoint history of the analog inception and into-digital growth of the APWA. It will then lead the audience through the basic search facets of the Archive. After a few minutes given to reading among these essays, the session will enter open discussion of what readers have found; stepping off from this discussion, the presenter will conclude by suggesting ways we might help prison witnesses in taking a vanguard position in resistance to the carceral state.
Date: 05/28/2021
Primary URL: https://www.birzeit.edu/en/announcements/Global-Carceral-States-Violence-Transgressions-Technologies-of-Imprisonment-Call
Conference Name: Global-Carceral-States-Violence-Transgressions-Technologies-of-Imprisonment