The Project

[One-sentence Description]

This project aims to build a navigable, searchable, and aggressively interactive concordance and composite of print and visual media regarding racially marginalized others (specifically, temporary and migrant workers, coyotes, and undocumented immigrants) in late 20th-century Los Angeles in order to interrogate the mass media’s role in creating and maintaining anxiety in relation to people who have a precarious relationship to documentation and, thus, citizenship.

[The Project]

A. Concepts

“I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photography, signature. One day you raise the right hand and you are American. They give you an American pass port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. The other one, their signature their seals. Their own image. And you learn the executive branch the legislative branch and the third. Justice. Judicial branch. It makes the difference. The rest is past.” – Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

The status of the document, as articulated in the epigraph, crystallizes the relationship between documentation and state apparatus: the document not only records citizenship, but testifies to the would-be-citizen’s commitment to the nation. In fact, the state constructs the new “citizen” in its “own image,” by constituting the citizen through a series of mediations based on its foundational text, the U.S. Constitution. This practice ultimately produces material documentation attesting to one’s legal right to be in the United States.

The relationship between documents and the state is a “practice of ruling with documents,” as noted by Cornelia Vismann in Files. She states, files “follow a distributive model that are kept by the recipient,” also noting that files “were simply treated as the other of diplomas, as nondocuments” (Vismann 71-72, 75). Indeed, she notes the tendency of the document to stand separately – like a diploma – as opposed to together in a collection. The singularity of the document, versus the unity of files, signals a practice of valorizing documents over people in official discourse, a practice that our project seeks to complicate by offering an alternate model of the relationship between documents and people.

Given the significance of documents as articulated by both Cha and Vismann, what, we wonder, is the relationship between documents and persons who have varying degrees of documentation (such as temporary workers and undocumented immigrants)? Or, to put it another way, how do documents register people and, conversely, how do people register documents?

To grapple with these questions we propose an examination of Los Angeles as a case study in the processing of what we call “maligned others,” namely, migrant and temporary workers, coyotes, and undocumented immigrants. We propose an examination of the area extending from the U.S.-Mexico border to the largely agricultural region of Santa Barbara county. This broad geographic region expands the perspective offered by scholarship done on “global cities” by theorists like Saskia Sassen, and of networked “metropolitan regions” presented by Manuel Castells, that take into account a diversity of layered networks and actors. Given Los Angeles’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border and the number of ports within the broader region we have described, we view the Los Angeles area as a prime location for exploring the ways in which freedom and access are not experienced by individuals and groups equally. To that end, our project will investigate the agency of labeled actors within this global city.

B. Goals

We propose to build a website that targets the juncture in Vismann’s distinction between the stored data of “files” and the public insistence on “documentation” by focusing on labels, tags, or what Matthew Fuller terms “flecks of identity.” Our primary concern lies with the similarity and differences that lead to the incarceration or deportation of those who are labeled as “illegal,” “undocumented,” “undesirable,” or “persons of suspicion,” depending on their varying levels of documentation. Therefore, the site will be oriented around processing and redeploying textual and visual “flecks” from Los Angeles area newspaper accounts. It will combine three basic digital processes: (1) a comparative concordance that allows the user—whom we will transform into a “maligned user”—to select and visualize data from a corpus of newspaper articles; (2) an image compositor which generates a composite output portrait from the images associated with each article accessed by the user’s search; and (3) a “documenteur” program which aggregates the concordance and image data from the user’s first two searches to generate a digital passport onscreen, which in turn legislates the user’s level of access for the remainder of the session.

The first two steps provide a means for investigating the type, frequency, and “stickiness” of malignant labels and phrase-image combinations across different newspapers and years. By way of the third step, the user is thus forced, unknowingly, to generate her own documentation through the navigational choices she makes. After selecting, from a set that appears on the starting screen, the labels she wishes to explore and compare, she is provided with a document featuring a composite photograph, a set of labels drawn from her searches and their collocates in the newspaper database, and a series of statistics resulting from those searches. You are what you search, the user is informed by the pseudo-official seal on the bottom half of the printable onscreen document. As the user proceeds to wield her remaining access rights, the onscreen document periodically revises itself. The user’s level of access decreases in unpredictable ways with each new cycle. Search and selection options are grayed-out. Concordance output data is censored. The relevant excerpts from the newspaper articles are no longer available. Images begin to de-pixilate. As the experience unfolds, the user’s digital passport itself gradually disintegrates. No access—but also no forced documentation.

Our core database used for the three-fold deployment described above—concordancing, compositing, documenting—will consist of text and images drawn from a series of Southern California newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Independent, La Opinion, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Los Angeles Business Journal. We will focus on the last fifty years, from 1961 through 2011, because the frequency of phrases such as “illegal immigrant” and “undocumented” skyrocketed around 1965, with “undocumented alien” only appearing in the late 1970s (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/).

Our interest in examining media produced and circulated within a specific geographical location arises from the need to account not just for the registering of persons (through official documents and periodicals), but also to answer the question, posed at the beginning of this proposal: How do persons register documents? Our definition of “document” here is a flexible one—if we’ve learned anything from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life it’s that the city is also a document. Using de Certeau’s theory of “strategies” and “tactics,” we hope to explore the ways in which maligned others are not only acted upon by institutions, but also the methods deployed to counter such institutional control, such as the practices employed by coyotes. As a means of critical analysis, we intend to combine approaches from the digital humanities with those from ethnic studies and critical race studies in the belief that each can fruitfully contribute to the other to produce an interactive media site that is searchable, accessible, and intellectually engaging  to a broad audience invested in human rights and media representation.

Our goal in applying to the Vectors-CTS Summer Institute, particularly as humanities scholars with limited technological skill sets, is to be able to collaborate with academics, designers, and activists from different fields who can help us to further solidify our project theoretically and technically. Our hope is that, in realizing our project multi-modally, we can engage audiences both within and outside academia in an interactive environment that will encourage discussion about the role of documents in relation to personhood, especially since the role of the virtual increasingly triangulates the relationship between people and documents.

C. Outcomes

Digital Humanities has offered a new set of tools and critical perspectives that have proven useful to American and Ethnic studies in terms of deconstructing power and privilege, as evidenced by the work of Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Chun, Anna Everett, Tara McPherson, and others. Yet the overwhelming majority of scholarship done in Digital Humanities does not deal with issues of prejudice, inequity, or social justice, though there has been increasing work done in the field of “artivism” or “hacktivism,” with projects like VozMob and the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Indeed, several Vectors projects – “Programmed Visions” and “The Guantanamobile Project” come to mind – explore the issues of race and mobility. Our project aims to insert itself in this emerging discourse that addresses the absence of Ethnic Studies as a model for Digital Humanities. As such, it seeks to identify and critique problems of representation and control (as done by Nakamura, Chun, and Everett), while at the same time creating a critical and analytical navigable database of primary materials that is free and accessible to those outside of the field. Our project will offer critically robust information and a unique user experience that analogs the difficulties of acquiring or experiencing (im)mobility in  contemporary Los Angeles. Thus, our project will borrow tools from Digital Humanities but apply the critical paradigms of Ethnic Studies in order to facilitate discourse between the fields.

More specifically, Documenteur addresses a concern we as researchers have with Digital Humanities, a field that appears modular and disconnected in terms of significant contemporary political issues and the experiences of historically oppressed others. It is our contention that Digital Humanities in its present form tends to de-emphasize questions of class, nationality, and ethnicity because of the dominant orientation around the term “user.” Unlike its political counterpart “subject,” which has a rich philosophical and theoretical history, the term “user” remains ahistorical, featureless, and faceless. Most problematically, it lacks the precarious balance of agency inherent in the term “subject”—as both the actor and the acted upon—because it emphasizes operation and consumption rather than subjection or surveillance. Our project, working within an Ethnic Studies framework and producing “maligned users,” looks to reconfigure Digital Humanities’ relationship to race by highlighting and critiquing how digital technologies (documents, databases, tags) are used by the official world to track and monitor various versions of the other.

Fuller’s notion of “flecks of identity” emphasizes how that tracking process relies on a combination of visual and textual media. His concept attempts to delineate “a primary composition element within surveillance systems.”  And that element thus cuts across media without simply dissolving categories such as “text,” “image,” “video,” and ‘sound” into the bleached one of “information.” A given “fleck,” in whatever medial instantiation, is simply “what at its scalar levels control sees, an informational token of conformity or infraction. An element, a cluster, or concatenation of data, flecks of identity—a number, a sample, a document, racial categorization—are features that identify the bearer as belonging to particular scalar positions and relations” (148). By emphasizing the role played by such differentiated and colored “flecks” in both textual and visual media in documenting various groups of maligned others, we hope to begin making the conversation between Digital Humanities and Ethnic Studies more reciprocal.

At a more particular scale—beyond the experience of the individual “maligned user” and the discipline of the Digital Humanities—this project aims to intervene in the conversation surrounding post 9/11 racial profiling already begun by sociologists, journalists, and NGOS by using cultural and media studies critiques that are traditionally used to examine the media and cultural production in addition to digital approaches of analysis. Coming from Chicano Studies and Asian American Studies, we shall attempt to bring our critical ethnic studies paradigms to digital modes of analysis (compositing and text mining, among others) of media texts. Through our proposed interdisciplinary approach, we hope to eventually produce a body of multimedia texts in the form of a digital concordance to complement traditional modes of literary and social studies scholarship and publication. These texts would provide a scholarly multimedia companion to the multimedia environment that exists in the Los Angeles metropolitan territory. Once published in an open online form, the texts produced will ultimately have a larger audience, rather than the somewhat restricted readers of scholarly journals or attendees of conferences. In this way, our goal is to produce scholarship that can actively be used to enact change. The labor required of the user (whom we imagine to be part of a wider, less academic audience) will highlight the importance of documentation and the difficulty of acquiring it. This user turned “maligned user” must struggle to navigate through the site and its accompanying databases of information. The movements will become restricted as his/her digital passport and identity is constructed and degraded through the “flecks of identity” left through the movements on the site.

Interactivity, in this case, will be an attempt to critically engage a broad audience about issues relevant to social and political issues unfolding in the U.S. from the latter part of the 20th century to their ramifications at the beginning of the 21st century. Rather than being a straightforward informational site, like the Critical Media Literacy site, this one will draw from games and electronic literature and will prove frustrating and problematic to the users who will find obstacles at every turn. Information will be difficult to access, and the user’s role in relation to the interface and the database will continuously be in flux, just as an individual in Los Angeles may have unstable and restrictive documentation based on their “legal” status or identifying physical features that set them apart from the perceived majority population. In addition, rather than being a secondary component to a scholarly text, the site will stand on its own as an alternative form of scholarly public presentation. We hope to eventually produce scholarly publications that theorize the project, as we have begun to do here, but each aspect (publications and the site) will be capacious and rigorous enough to stand on its own. Nor will one be more legitimate than the other, regardless of the intended audience.

 

By:

Anne Cong-Huyen | Renee Hudson | Jeremy Schmidt

^{Banner image is by Nathaniel Smith (flickr: twentyonecents) and is used under a Creative Commons license.}