Category: YSM & Slavery

• Digital Public History and Audience(s)

  As an academic historian who is learning about Digital Public History, I’ve had to think about the audience of my work in new ways. I can’t just rely on a shared knowledge of historiography and terminology to make my work relevant. Instead, I’ve had to consider in greater detail how much background my audience needs…

• YSM & Slavery Project Evaluation

  My YSM & Slavery website project is a prototype for an institutional website sharing the preliminary findings of research into YSM’s history with slavery and, more generally, racial medicine. It aims to educate people already connected with YSM and the wider New Haven community about our findings and promote a conversation about how to relieve…

• Project Update #4 – YSM & Slavery

  As I posted in my last update, my website design is mostly complete, but I’ve been struggling with writing the last two vignettes (“Race and curriculum” and “Black medical students”) for it. I think a subject like a medical school’s history with slavery and race – a subject that has such historical and continuing impact…

• Project Update #3 – YSM & Slavery

  I finalized the nuts and bolts of my website, wrapped up my research for the vignettes (for now), and finished a draft of my first vignette (of three) this week. To get the look and feel I wanted for the vignette links on the homepage, I had to manually add some HTML to make the…

• Project Update #2 – YSM & Slavery

  This week I focused on completing research for the planned vignette on the medical school curriculum. I thought I’d be done with that research by now, but I’m still wrapping up some loose ends – specifically, I’m reading assigned medical textbooks. I plan to write that vignette later this week and to begin collecting supporting…

• Project Update #1 – YSM & Slavery

  This week I’ve been focused on completing the research for the vignettes that will be the main content pieces of the YSM & Slavery website. I currently have planned three vignettes: one involving a bodysnatching, another about the medical school curriculum, and a third about Black medical students. I have enough material for the Black…

• Project Proposal – YSM & Slavery

  The Yale School of Medicine (YSM) has recently undertaken a historical investigation of its ties to slavery and related patterns of racial discrimination. While some medical schools’ histories of supporting slavery or contributing to racial science are well known, Yale’s history has largely gone unexamined because unlike Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania it…

• Personas – YSM & Slavery

  To understand potential users’ needs for the proposed YSM & slavery website, I experimented with creating deign personas. Personas represent significant groups of real-world people that you are designing for, and the goal is to use them to help design the website for those audiences. For an introduction to personas, check out these articles. Here…

• Audience Interviews – YSM & Slavery

  As part of my postdoctoral associate appointment, I am researching the Yale School of Medicine’s (YSM) historical ties to slavery and related patterns of racial discrimination. While the project team (myself, another postdoc, and the supervising professor) hope the final output of our project will reach an audience beyond YSM, we are currently considering how…