Developed and used as research source data for the Spring 2022 University of Oregon ENG 470 Technologies and Text Capstone Course
This digital collection serves as a repository of research materials related to the history of environmental racism in the Eugene-Springfield community. In consultation with the nonprofit organization Beyond Toxics, students and faculty at the University of Oregon are working to collect and catalog primary sources related to the formal and informal segregation of housing, education, and outdoor recreation opportunities in our city.
We aim to better understand the ways predominantly white institutions have systematically shifted environmental hazards onto communities of color and how these communities have organized and advocated around issues of environmental justice.
The collection brings together reports, policy documents, maps, newspaper clippings, newsletters, museum exhibit catalogs, curricular materials, academic research, and demographic data that together shed light on our local history and its relationship to events and trends at the state, regional, and national level. These materials come from city, state, and federal government websites; UO Libraries digital collections; the Lane County History Museum Archives; and publicly available sources.
The materials in this collection are gathered here for educational and not-for-profit research purposes. The project team has either received explicit permission to include these materials in the collection or has completed a fair use evaluation for its use. The team has also made a good-faith effort to determine and record rights information about each primary source in the item-level metadata. Users who wish to reuse sources from this collection should verify independently the copyright status of each item and contact the rights holder directly for reuse permission. Content developed specifically for this website is copyrighted by the University of Oregon under the terms of an agreement with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is published under a Creative Commons-BY-ND-NC license.
CollectionBuilder and digital pedagogy support for this project were sponsored by the a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH Award HAA-281018-21). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Web resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Partnership development and environmental justice education for this project were sponsored by a Sustainability Fellowship for Community-Engaged Learning from the University of Oregon Office of Sustainability and the Mellon-funded Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Special Initiative 2008-08962).
This project was inspired by Beyond Toxics, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working for environmental justice in Oregon. Project content was developed in consultation with Lisa Arkin, Executive Director, and Arjorie Arberry-Beribeault, West Eugene Environmental Justice Organizer, as part of the organization’s long-term grassroots organizing in Eugene. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed by users of this material do not necessarily represent those of Beyond Toxics.
UO Faculty: Mattie Burkert (English), Kate Thornhill (Libraries)
UO Students: Bobbie Adelson, Sammy Albert, Aravind Arunachalam, Natalie Ayala, Prayerna Babu, Meg Blevens, Noah Brown, Mario Canul, Miya Cohn, Lauryn Cole, Edin Conway, Eli Cox, Teresa David, Rye Davies, Tyler Fox, Joe Funderburg, Sofia Gluck, Abby Gregg, Hayden Grow, James Ha, Janelle Harris, Danté Hatcher-Vasquez, Kiele Head, Olivia Hicks, Dora Jolivet, Ryan Kenney, Kyndall Kirkland, Haylee Klingler, Whitney Klo, Sophia Marie Labucay, Jamie O’Connell, Grace Oh, Avery Olson, Catherine Oswalt, Willem Patrick, Sasha Poll, Emma Ramage, Madison Ridolfi, Charlotte Roder, Brianna Rojas, Allia Service, Lilly Smith, Oliver Smith, Sesilie Stout, Jack Talbott, Olivia Tong, Ysenia Torres, Sam Walton, Ben Weiss, Kendall Wilber, Henry Wool, Leo Zhao
Mandy Gettler and Chuck Williams (UO Innovation Partnership Services) Sarah Stoeckl (UO Office of Sustainability) Allison Fischer-Olson (Lane County History Museum Archives) Franny Gaede, Gabriele Hayden, and Kathy Stroud (UO Libraries) Land Acknowledgment It is impossible to address environmental racism in our community without recognizing the Indigenous people who have stewarded these lands and waters since time immemorial. The cities of Eugene and Springfield and the University of Oregon are situated on the traditional homelands of the Kalapuya people, whom the U.S. Government forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855. Today, Kalapuya people’s descendents are citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. We express our respect for them and for all federally recognized Tribal Nations of Oregon–including the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, and the Klamath Tribes–and for all other displaced Indigenous peoples who call Kalapuya Ilihi home.
This digital collection includes digitized archival materials that document traumatic histories and violent ideologies.
Some of these materials use offensive language, express biased or hateful views, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes, particularly with respect to race, color, national origin, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. In addition, some of the descriptive metadata used to catalog these materials is inherited from predominantly white institutions where communities of color have historically had less access and privilege, and therefore less control over their own representation.
The Eugene-Springfield community and the University of Oregon continue to reflect and to be structured by these histories, and our project team is not immune to bias or prejudice. We are actively working to remediate, re-process, and re-contextualize these objects as source material for anti-racist digital storytelling projects that might eventually play a small role in repairing some of these harms.
Check out the CollectionBuilder docs for how to get started, or visit the CollectionBuilder home for more information.
If you are interested in using CollectionBuilder, or are already using it, please drop us a line ([email protected]) since we would love to learn more about it's use in the wild. There are also currently opportunities to collaborate on CollectionBuilder.
collectionbuilder-gh is intended as a simple template for hands-on teaching about digital libraries.
It can be used in a workshop setting to take participants through digitization and metadata creation, to having a live collection site hosted on GitHub.
collectionbuilder-gh aims to be well documented and easy to configure by following the example, with the potential to scaffold learning of a multitude of transferable digital and data skills.
A project in "minimal computing", it provides a depth of learning opportunities, allowing users to take complete ownership over the project and make their work open to the world.
Learn about:
- Git and GitHub basics
- Markdown, plaintext writing and content creation
- HTML, CSS, and JS literacy
- commandline literacy
- GitHub collaboration and project management
- Jekyll basics
- working in the Open, open source and open data
- digital libraries concepts such as "collections as data", minimal computing, data-driven design
We prefer commonly understood formats (such as CSV spreadsheets over YAML), and convention over configuration (follow the example over learn all the options).
- Jekyll for GitHub Pages
- Layout using Bootstrap.
- jQuery
- Mapping using Leaflet.js
- Tables using DataTables
- Galleries using lightGallery
- Simple lunr search
- Rich markup using Schema.org and Open Graph protocol standards.
CollectionBuilder documentation and general web content is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
This license does NOT include any objects or images used in digital collections, which may have individually applied licenses described by a "rights" field.
CollectionBuilder code is licensed MIT.
This license does not include external dependencies included in the assets/lib directory, which are covered by their individual licenses.