BRJA

I'm not sure when it first struck me, but at some point while I was correcting a machine-generated transcript from the Black Reproductive Justice Archive I felt an overwhelming sense of admiration for the people I was listening to. Nobody should have to go through these experiences of pain, humiliation and discrimination let alone when at their most vulnerable – the injustice, the racism ingrained in institutions that they had little choice but to entrust their lives to. Yet, intertwined amongst the recalling of horrific events, I found stories of hope, determination and the desire to change – through educational programs, support groups and community building.

I've been at TheirStory for a little over two years now. It's a small organisation focussed on the capture, analysis and dissemination of oral history, which it feels like is increasingly important in a world where truth is becoming harder to divine. It's also fascinating place to sit if, like me, you're interested in the power of storytelling. And often I find myself listening to amazing storytellers telling extremely important stories in the most unfiltered and compelling way.

Unfortunately I don't get much time to work on side projects. Most of my time is occupied with managing the development of the TheirStory platform itself. But occasionally there is the opportunity to create something with the fascinating oral history content that we capture. And an example of this was the project mentioned above. The BRJA was something that started at Cornell University in the US. The original remit of this project was to create a content managed website containing stories from BRJA interviews.

I edited and corrected some of the transcripts myself using the TheirStory editor and combined the output with the Hyperaudio Wordpress plugin. Liaising closely with the students at Cornell and a web designer, we came up with theblackrjarchive.com - a purposely simple site to showcase the interviews.

From the team at BRJA:

The Black Reproductive Justice Archive (BRJA) is the brainchild of Tamika Nunley, professor of history at Duke University, specializing in slavery studies and African American women's and gender history. Professor Nunley was inspired to create the BRJA in 2023 when she witnessed firsthand the work being done in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio around Black maternal health. At the time, Nunley was mother to a young daughter and expecting a baby girl. A longtime member of the greater Cleveland community and a newly expectant mother herself, she knew firsthand the dire state of Black maternal health in her city and in the United States. Today, Black women are three to five times more likely to face maternal death than white women in the U.S. regardless of social, educational, and economic status. The city of Cleveland ranks fourth in the nation for excellence in gynecological care but ranks last as a great city for Black women to live based upon health conditions, educational access, wage earnings and overall outcomes. 

Against this terrifying local and national landscape worked those who sought to improve the lives and reproductive experiences of Black mothers. In Cleveland, doulas, midwives, clinicians, grassroots organizers, and politicians proposed out-of-the box solutions and collaborative initiatives to resolve the crisis in Black maternal health. As Nunley heard and witnessed their impact in Cleveland, she committed to recording their voices, experiences, and knowledge in an oral archive. The BRJA was thus created as a multimedia platform that would chronicle their accounts and contextualize them within Black women's long history of reproductive justice. 

Our first series of interviewees were identified through Nunley's local connections in the greater Cleveland community. Once we interviewed our initial set of participants, we asked them to recommend other stakeholders working on Black maternal and reproductive health who we might interview. As a result, our set of participants in the archive expanded gradually by word of mouth and recommendations. 

One complaint we often hear from our users is that they have huge amounts of captured oral history, but often nobody actually reads it. The challenge then is to maximise the accessibility and discoverability of that content. Much of the work we are doing at TheirStory is related to making it easier to both find and disseminate important stories. We do this through careful association of metadata and powerful search functionality, we add to this several ways to remix, curate and present stories through a number of publishing workflows.

Recently I've been working with some stories from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – transcripts that had been transcribed by hand 20 or 30 years ago. My main task was to get these stories into the TheirStory platform, which included timing the transcripts at word level. I've been thinking about word "alignment" for a while now, and managed to put together a lightweight library which given a machine transcription with timings and a human corrected transcript (without timings) could marry the two. Carefully checking the results of this process inevitably meant I had to watch the testimonies and again I was struck by the poignancy of these stories, especially in the context of the US as it is today.

I found myself wondering whether these testimonials could act as antidote to Holocaust denialism and how long it would take for these deniers to point the finger at AI deepfake technology as the source of this content.

To me the authenticity of these stories shines through, individually but also and, I think most importantly, taken as aggregate. Of course it's impossible for all oral history testimonies to be 100% accurate, but viewed as a whole and carefully curated, linked and exposed, I think these testimonies could be presented in a way that would make the truths they spoke to hard to deny.