Texas After Violence Project: Review
Reviewers: Kevin Pham
Review Began: April 3, 2022
Review Ended: April6, 2022
Project links:
Data and Sources:
- Oral histories through interviews with people whose loved ones had been executed by the state or had been victims of state-sanctioned violence in general; as well as lawyers, jurors, media witnesses, and others who had participated in state-sanctioned violence
Processes:
- Staff and volunteer-conducted interviews
- “Life and Death in a Carceral State” program: Training for directly affected people to conduct and record interviews with their fellow community members
- “Virtual Belonging” project: Empirical research and tool development for assessing the affective impact of digital technologies on the creation of records documenting minority communities by community-based archives
Presentation:
- “Texas After Violence” page is largely informational, with content mostly concerned with history, process, and the goals of the organization
- The “After Violence Archive” includes a homepage and a space to browse materials (largely interviews) with options to filter by category (mass incarceration; murder and death penalty; police violence; etc.) and by collection
Digital Tools Used to Build It:
- Zoom for interviews and training sessions
Languages:
- English
Review
The Texas After Violence Project is a community-based archive and documentary project chronicling state-sanctioned violence in the United States. The project was launched in 2007 specifically to produce an oral history of victims of Texas’ death penalty by interviewing the loved ones of the victims; the project then later came to document the stories and experiences of victims of the United States criminal legal system more broadly. On top of the project’s archive—the After Violence Archive—Texas After Violence also provides actual training, reports, and toolkits for community members that teach them how to conduct interviews and contribute to the archive, grounding the project’s collaborative ethos. The archive is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, while other projects are funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Judith Filler Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the Shield-Ayres Foundation.
The After Violence Archive “serves as an online repository for materials (interviews, correspondence, art, and other items) documenting state-sanctioned violence in the United States,” collected from 2007-present. The content of the archive (termed generally as the “Digital Heritage”) can be browsed by collection (only one as of now) or category, where the categories include “Activism and Advocacy,” “Mass incarceration,” “Murder and the Death Penalty,” “Police violence,” “US Criminal legal system, “Visions of Justice,” and “Surviving Violence.” The archive itself is organized familiarly, with a right-hand navigation section with search and metadata filters—such as media type (image, video, file), keywords, etc.—while the content itself appears on the left. The majority of the content provided by Texas After Violence are interviews, while other content is also provided by partner organizations such as the Inside Books Project Archive. Each file of content has its own page, including the file itself, a description of the file, the aforementioned metadata, as well as creators and contributors. Presumably, the latter indexes the way in which Texas After Violence trains community members to conduct interviews and contribute to the archive, and these members would be noted as contributors or creators. Unfortunately, there is little information regarding the digital tools used to create the platform; additionally, the archive itself can only be accessed in English, while the language of the content is subject to the original language of its production.
The goal/aim of the archive as well as Texas After Violence’s other projects—such as “Life and Death in a Carceral State” (an archive documenting carceral violence in Texas) and the “Access to Treatment Initiative” (education program training medical professionals about how to treat underserved populations)—broadly concerns producing transparency around state-sanctioned violence, developing a robust education agenda, and above all engaging the community in public knowledge production. This points to a focus on both online and offline platforms to not only collect/digitize information but also engage community members face-to-face.
As mentioned before, there isn’t any information regarding the digital tools to produce the After Violence Archive, besides the fact that the team uses Zoom for interviews and training sessions. The project might improve its ability to cater to the community by publicizing a document with information on the tools used to create the archive, such that others can create their own public archives.