RICHES Internship Blog Post #6

            This week, working on my internship at RICHES, we made headway with the email issues with the teams program. Kirk was able to invite me to have access to the different folders, however, I cannot make changes or add anything. So I will have to send any documents that need to be uploaded to teams once they have been approved by Dr. Gordon to either Geoff or Dr. Gordon, who will have to upload the document to teams on my behalf. That being said, I am very excited to be able to work on the Bending Towards Justice Project now and help out Dr. Gordon with the legal history portion of the project and looking at voting rights and voter suppression. I met with Dr. Gordon Wednesday for my meeting to talking about my independent studies course, which she is the instructor for. During this meeting, she told me to look up Supreme Court cases on this topic and their decisions. She also told me that there was an existing list of a few cases that had been typed up and uploaded into teams, so I make sure to add new ones.  I’ve been searching for articles and websites in which I can find these decisions. Anna pointed us to the website oyez.org. This website will be very useful in helping me find more cases. During our Bending Towards Justice meeting today, Dr. Lester brought up a very interesting and important point that I never thought about. She suggested we think about how we want to present this portion of the digital exhibit to the public since it will already be quite text heavy. From a public history standpoint, this is quite interesting. Both Anna and I took Introduction to Public History last semester. It is important in creating any exhibit to think about how one should display information and photographs, as well as documents and artifacts, to engage the public and make it interesting and engaging so they want to find out more. There are also a few issues though; we have to get permission to use photos and deal with copyright and Fair Use. In cases like this, it may be best to use royalty-free photographs which convey the same message for this section and the exhibit as a whole. It is also possible that, as we discussed in the meeting, we could lay out the Supreme Court cases section in which the various decisions can be accessed under multiple tabs, so that it is not just one big block of text. The people visiting the Bending Towards Justice exhibit page can choose which ever case they like and read an excerpt about it and if the Supreme Court’s decisions. I made a point of bringing up in the meeting, as we are in an election year and in the middle of a worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, if there have been any cases of voter suppression currently that went to the Supreme Court. I did find one New York Times article in which the people of Wisconsin wanted an extension on their absentee ballots because of COVID-19, which was refused by the Supreme Court.  I think this article is very important and may be a good case to include for the Bending Towards Justice exhibit to make it even more relatable to what we are experiencing currently.

 

Rutenberg, Jim, and Nick Corasaniti. “How a Supreme Court Decision Curtailed the Right to Vote in Wisconsin.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/us/wisconsin-election-voting-rights.html. Accessed June 19 2020.

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