On CalDay, in the oldest building on campus, undergraduate Cassie Xiong stepped to the microphone and introduced a new tool for understanding what many consider the defining event in UC Berkeley history. Xiong, an Interdisciplinary Studies Major and OCIO Communications intern, described her team’s design for a modern entryway to the Bancroft Library’s Free Speech Movement Digital Archive. Featuring an interactive timeline and allowing researchers to access text, image, and audio sources in just a few clicks, the student-created website had just won top honors in the #HackFSM: A Hackathon for the Free Speech Movement Digital Archive competition.
As part of the Digital Humanities initiative, the Bancroft Library hosted the 12-day, interdisciplinary hackathon celebrating the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement. #HackFSM assembled students from all over campus interested in digital archives, digital humanities, and the free speech movement. As the first humanities-based hackathon on campus, each team was required to have at least one humanist and one programmer. Cassie’s teammates are majoring in computer science.
Bancroft Library, Research IT, and Library Systems Office staff worked closely together to develop and document an Application Programming Interface (API) that would provide computer-enabled access to texts, images, and metadata from Bancroft’s the Free Speech Movement digital archive. #HackFSM assembled students from all over campus interested in digital archives, digital humanities, and the free speech movement. Seven groups of students collaborated to create compelling user interfaces for the data provided by the API.
Along with sophomore programmers Alice Liu, Craig Hiller, and Kevin Casey, Xiong worked every night until midnight to develop the website. Their winning design features an interactive timeline and allows researchers to access text, image, and audio sources in just a few clicks. This was the first hacking event Xiong completed and in addition to gaining a deeper appreciation for programming, going through the images and documents brought a movement she had only briefly heard about to life. In creating the digital archive she learned just how many individuals were involved with the Free Speech Movement. Xiong found the collaboration process "extremely eye-opening" and added, "it was an amazing experience to work with students from a completely different background and realize that we each had something unique to offer to this project."
The digital humanities initiative at Berkeley supports faculty, students and staff who are engaged in the use or critique of digital tools and methodologies for research or teaching. Research IT staff have been actively involved in helping to build a campus community around digital humanities, and have partnered with organizations including the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, the D-Lab, the Townsend Center, and the Bancroft Library to put on events showcasing digital humanities research at Berkeley. #HackFSM was the first event to directly involve students in doing digital humanities work and it won’t be the last. The success of the campus’s first interdisciplinary digital humanities hackathon has inspired the planning committee to begin planning new DH-based events for the near future. “Digital humanities is a highly collaborative endeavor, and bringing students, faculty, technologists, and content providers together to further research is what it is all about,” said Bancroft Library Archivist for Digital Collections Mary Elings.