On the Books Project Manager

Description

The University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is seeking a project manager for the On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance (OTB) project. The project has created a text corpus of NC General Statutes from 1866-1967 and identified laws likely to be Jim Crow laws using machine learning and a training set of laws classified by experts as either Jim Crow or not Jim Crow. The Jim Crow laws identified by the project are available as a plain text corpus and can be searched from the OTB website. The project website lists and contextualizes the Jim Crow laws and provides educational resources. A GitHub repository provides documented scripts generated by the project team. This project is part of the Reckoning Initiative at the University Libraries, and reflects our commitment to use equity, inclusion, and social justice as a lens for all our work. To read more about the project, visit the website: https://onthebooks.lib.unc.edu/.

The next phase of the project will expand the project to two additional states and facilitate the use of OTB products in research and teaching. To expand the project, funds will be regranted to teams from two partner states. The partner states will create corpora for their own states and use the OTB training set to identify Jim Crow laws. To facilitate the use of the OTB products in research and teaching, three graduate student research fellows, two or more faculty research fellows, and three teaching fellows will be awarded funds to use OTB products (including the website, corpora, training set, algorithm, and workflows). Research fellows will use products from OTB in a research project. Teaching Fellows will create an education module using OTB products that will be taught to undergraduate or graduate courses.
The Project Manager will serve as the main program contact for the project and will plan and organize work.

*Please note the application deadline is 11/23/2021!*