Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations

CBBG wins two prestigious awards

Julie Golia — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 16:06:41 +0000

Since the Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations project wrapped in 2014, it has earned two prestigious accolades. In 2015, CBBG was the recipient of the 2015 Oral History Association Elizabeth B. Mason Project Award, which recognizes outstanding oral history projects in the field. The project, said the award committee, "took an open-ended, collaborative, community-based approach to exploring mixed heritage populations; we felt it provided an ideal model for work that historical societies ought to do." CBBG project director Sady Sullivan and BHS Oral Historian Zaheer Ali accepted the award at the October 2015 Oral History Association Annual Meeting.

In July 2016, Brooklyn Historical Society earned a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for Local and State History (AASLH) for the CBBG project. Reflecting on the award, BHS President Deborah Schwartz observed, "discussions on race and ethnicity are particularly timely and relevant given the country's cultural and political climate - the subject matter is just as complex as it was in centuries past. Our goal is to inspire spirited discourse in a productive way. We are very proud of the wokr that has gone into this historically significant project, and hwe have established a dynamic model for how issues of mixed heritage and identity are discussed in a public forum."

Accessing CBBG through the Digital Humanities

Julia Lipkins — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 20:19:13 +0000

I'm pleased to announce that the Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) oral history collection is now open for research! The complete collection of over 100 oral history interviews is available for use in the Othmer Library and a portion of the contents are accessible online here on the CBBG website.

An exciting feature of the CBBG website is a new digital humanities application known as OHMS, or the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer. OHMS, developed by oral history wunderkind Doug Boyd and his team at the University of Kentucky Libraries, tackles an inherent challenge in oral history archives, i.e. accessing the oral history via the recording manifestation vs. transcript manifestation. While the audio recording provides the richness and context of the narrator's voice, the transcript offers researchers the capacity to conduct keyword searches throughout the interview. OHMS solves this dilemma by marrying the audio recording to the transcript, thereby making both manifestations of the interview searchable.

Let's take the oral history with Ericka Basile as an example. Basile, an artist who grew up in Tennessee and lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Throughout her interview, she discusses the Creole language from both a personal and historical perspective. To find all discussions related to "Creole" in the transcript and audio recording, follow these 4 easy steps:

Move the toggle switch to TRANSCRIPT
Do a keyword search for "Creole" in the search box. OHMS will provide a list of instances where Basile and the interviewer mention the word.
Click on an instance in the list. The transcript will scroll to the corresponding sentence.
Click on the nearest time-code on the left-hand side of the transcript. The audio recording will jump to corresponding sentence.

By marrying the transcript to the audio recording, OHMS provides researchers with unprecedented access to oral histories.

Another method of OHMS navigation is through indexes created by CBBG staff and interns. We've broken the transcript down into sequential segments based on the content of the interview. In the Basile interview, for example, you could go directly to a segment titled, "Haitian heritage and ethnic diversity in Tennessee" at moment 37:47. Since OHMS provides a direct link to each segment, you can send a link to the "Haitian heritage” segment. The recipient will then open the link to start the audio recording at 37:47.

OHMS is a truly amazing research tool and I encourage you to explore the application through the CBBG website. To launch OHMS, go the CBBG website and select LISTEN. Choose a narrator from the list by clicking on a name. At the bottom of the narrator page, select SEARCH SYNCHRONIZED AUDIO AND TRANSCRIPT. You will be directed to a new page with the OHMS application.

Enjoy!

Decentering Authority: CBBG - A Collaborative Oral History Project

Sady Sullivan — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 21:56:14 +0000

Author:

Sady Sullivan

Curator for the Columbia Center for Oral History

Sady Sullivan, Curator for the Columbia Center for Oral History, is the creator of the Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) project and former Director of Oral History at Brooklyn Historical Society where she managed new oral history projects as well as preservation of BHS's oral history collections dating back to 1973.

Read more about Sady Sullivan

Themes:

Self & Identity

Food & Celebrations

Race & Ethnicity

Cultural Preservation

CBBG featured on NY1

Sady Sullivan — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 21:45:03 +0000

NY1 paid a visit to Brooklyn Historical Society's beautiful Othmer Library for this feature about Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (12/29/2014).

Watch the video here.

Themes:

Race & Ethnicity

Cultural Preservation

CBBG featured in NY Times

Sady Sullivan — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 14:59:09 +0000

On December 2, 2014, The New York Times featured a story about CBBG, written by Felicia R. Lee:

“'I think it’s unique in its breadth,' said Deborah Schwartz, president of the historical society. 'Oral histories are usually very specific, and this is very wide-ranging, with mixed heritage meaning different things to different people. It is also infused with the reflections of scholars: historians, anthropologists, sociologists...'
About 30 of the oral histories are now gathered on the website, which includes photographs, audio clips, transcripts and scholarly articles. The full oral history collection will be available next year at the historical society’s Othmer Library, the repository of more than 1,200 oral history narratives on a variety of topics. In February, educators will also be offered a curriculum for grades six through 12.
All the oral history subjects were volunteers who live or work in Brooklyn, or did so in the past. They were a diverse flock, including biracial lesbian couples and Jewish couples from different European countries. Their stories reflect changes from the time when mixed marriage often meant spouses of different religions to a time when it means gay or interracial marriage, or both, said Sady Sullivan, the former director of oral history at the historical society. Ms. Sullivan, who conceived the project, has been named the curator of oral history at Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
'The idea I get really excited about is that this is for the future,' Ms. Sullivan said. 'What will it be like to listen to stories about the social construction of race in 150 years?'"

Read the full article here.

Themes:

Race & Ethnicity

Cultural Preservation

Fiona Gardner and Uche Nduka

Julia Lipkins — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 16:25:25 +0000

Interview Highlight:

"People look at us as if we dropped in from the clouds, even at this phase of human history. I didn’t know that we can still have that kind of reaction, even within New York. It’s not like people voice it out in terms of antagonistic confrontation, but they can still see it in the eyes. The surprise -- “Oh, how do they manage?” You know: “how did that happen?” And all that."

Narrator:

Fiona Gardner and Uche Nduka

Fiona Gardner was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her mother is descended from Romanian Jews and Germans, and her father's family has roots in the United States dating back to the American Revolution. Gardner was raised in an observant Jewish household. She became involved in the arts during her childhood and she attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island for a B.A. in painting. Gardner lived in Boston for three years before moving to New York City to attend Columbia University for a graduate degree in the visual arts.

Read more about Fiona Gardner and Uche Nduka

Interviewer:

Charis Emily Shafer

Documentarian and Oral Historian

Charis Emily Shafer holds a B.A. in art history from New York University and a M.A. in film and literature from the University of Essex in England and is currently perusing a M.A. in the Oral History Master’s Program at Columbia University. Charis is also an associate producer on the television series Trabank Trek which aired in May of 2011 on the Travel Channel International and was an assistant on the documentary Resident Aliens that was screened in New York at the Asian American International Film Festival in August, 2011.

Read more about Charis Emily Shafer

OHMS Transcript XML:

http://cbbg.brooklynhistory.org/sites/default/files/transcripts/xml/bhs_2011.019.048_Gardner-Fiona-Nduka-Uche_20130605_x.xml

Fiona Gardner and Uche Nduka

Julia Lipkins — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 16:16:59 +0000

Uche Nduka was born and raised in Umuahia, Nigeria. His family is Igbo and he was a child during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970. He studied literature and history at the University of Nigeria and worked as a freelance journalist. He lived in Bremen, Germany and Amsterdam, Holland for about twelve years, and then moved to the United States in 2007. He lived in Brooklyn and attended Long Island University for an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Making Space to Talk About Race

Nayantara Sen — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 15:43:30 +0000

Author:

Manissa McCleave Maharawal

Anthropology Graduate Student, CUNY Graduate Center

Manissa McCleave Maharawal is currently a graduate student working toward a PhD in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research looks at processes of urbanization, neoliberalism, religious violence and the new middle class in India.

Read more about Manissa McCleave Maharawal

Tags:

Acculturation and Assimilation

Themes:

Self & Identity

Race & Ethnicity

Cross-Cultural Fusion in the Art of Japanese Tattooing

Sady Sullivan — Thu, 03 Jul 2014 19:31:56 +0000

Author:

Kip Fulbeck

Artist, University of California Santa Barbara

Kip Fulbeck is a pioneering artist, spoken word performer, author, and filmmaker. He has been featured on CNN, MTV, The TODAY Show, and PBS, and has performed and exhibited in over twenty countries and throughout the U.S.

Read more about Kip Fulbeck

Tags:

Themes:

Religion & Traditions

Cultural Preservation

Mixed Blood Photo Project by CYJO

Sady Sullivan — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 20:56:49 +0000

Mixed Blood (2010 - 2013) "is a photographic and textual project portraying NYC and Beijing based families that include children with 'mixed' races, ethnicities, and cultures" by photographer CYJO. CYJO is an American artist of Korean ethnicity and she is very interested in individual and collective idenity and the relationship between tradition and modernity.

In a recent feature on Slate, "Stunning Portaits of Mixed-Race Families," CYJO said,

"one of the reasons she began the series was a curiosity about exactly what 'mixed ethnicity' currently represents, noting that as countries such as China continue to modernize, how the mix of new culture will blend with longstanding traditions will be interesting to follow. While there are people who fear cultural blending, Cyjo said the idea of a global identity and our definition of self, culture and race is rooted in life experiences and personal choices.
'But the bigger question is how will cultures and people maintain their individuality?' she asked. 'What will be those cultural differences aside from language and food that will make a culture unique? There’s so much more we can learn from each other, especially from our differences.'

Read the full article here.

See CYJO's portfolio here.

Themes:

Self & Identity

Parents & Children

Race & Ethnicity

Cultural Preservation