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Hi, I'm Taylor Arnold. Courtney Rivard, Lauren Tilton, and I have created the digital book project Layered Lives: Rhetoric and Representation in the Southern Life History Project. The project was published by Stanford University Press in August 2022. Layered Lives recovers the history of the Southern Life History Project through an interdisciplinary approach, combining close readings of archival material with computational methods that analyze the collection at scale. In this video, we will walk through the structure of the project and the affordances of the digital platform. After entering the platform, visitors are greeted with a Table of Contents on the left-hand panel and a map of the southeastern United States on the right. The text of the project is organized into what we call layers. We hope to highlight that visitors can should feel free to explore the project in a nonlinear fashion. The map provides an interactive visualization showing where each of the interviews in our collection took place. Clicking on one of the layers reveals the text of the project. Historic images are shown embedded throughout each layer. Footnotes function as hyperlinks to further information. In bibliographic citations, links are given back to jump viewers back into the texts.

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Throughout the text, hyperlinks that appear in bold maroon, such as this one, indicate and correspond to documentary evidence that we've incorporated in directly into the project. Hovering over the link reveals an image of the documentary evidence, provides a concrete link to the archive in a way that would be difficult within the constraints of a traditional print book.

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Navigating to Layer 3, we see that this layer focuses on spatial analysis. More maroon links link to specific visualizations of the map, for example here, showing only those interviews conducted with Black interviewees. And here, showing other ethnic groups that were interviewed as part of the Southern Life History Project. The map is fully interactive. We can scroll in and out like this, as well as control which kind of map that we're looking at. So here we'll look at the map visualized by the most prolific writers in the Southern Life History Project. Clicking on a bubble shows a link--a list and links to all of the interviews that were collected from a given location. Clicking on an individual interview opens a new tab and the text encoded in TEI XML and and digitized by our project of the interview itself. Moving now to Layer 4, Layer 4 focuses on the application of text analysis techniques.

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Further hyperlinks in this layer open a new kind of visualization on the right-hand side.

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We see either a set of topics from a technique called Latent Dirichlet Allocation, where a set of document clusters from spectral clustering. These showed different ways of understanding patterns across the text of the interviews, and different ways of finding interviews that discuss similar topics. They also provide another interface to access the text of the individual interviews by clicking on them. Then returning to the side. We can return to the map by clicking on the map button in the upper left-hand side of the visualization window. And at any point that we wish, you can return to the themes by clicking on the Themes button in the upper left hand corner of the visualization. Through these variety of visualization techniques, users can cycle between reading the project's narrative, directly exploring archival evidence, reading the interviews themselves, and exploring the collection as a whole through the spatial and textual interfaces. We hope you will visit and explore our digital book project which can be found at layeredlives.org. Thank you.