DeathScapes

Project Overview (DH 299, Spring 2017: S. Razack)

Project Link: Global DeathScapes

Individual Case Links: Michael Eligon, Jan Szamko, Byron Richard Debassige 

Additional Project Content: Mapping Ethics, Team Correspondence, and the Australian Team’s “Storyboard”/ “Script.”

Project Description: “This project seeks new ways to document, understand and respond to the critical issue of racialized deaths in sites of state custody such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centers. It plans to examine the conditions under which Indigenous and border-related deaths occur, and to explore how legal and social accountability for them is assigned. Moving away from individual national contexts, it seeks to identify and map, at global as well as local levels, the shared institutional practices, technologies and explanatory frameworks that characterize custodial deaths in the key settler states of Australia, Canada and the United States. This may inform policy-making with the aim of preventing deaths in custody.” This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council (Canada) Partnership Development Grant (2015-2017) and an ARC Discovery Grant (CI1) 2016 – 2018 ($444,984.00)

Note: please do not circulate any of the above. These sites are live briefly and for the purposes of the DH portfolio. 

Project Role

Initially, I served as an ethical consultant for the project. My goal was to advise Sherene and the other team members (including a team of legal scholars in Canada) on the ethics of GIS. As the project progressed, I set up a rough prototype of a site connected to a set of StoryMaps. The Canadian team supplied the legal information, and I decided how to parcel it out into blog posts and throughout the accompanying StoryMap. These were intended to be rough prototypes of what we could do or how we might consider staging the presentation of information. As the conversation with the Australian team continued, I remained as an ethical consultant and provided feedback on their “storyboards” and “script.” This is an on-going project.

Reflection

As I continue to work in this field, one of my criteria for signing on to proposed DH projects is asking up front what data or content folks already have. Other questions I ask of projects are the following: what assumptions are “built in” to your development of the interface? How do you want the viewer/user to engage with the project and create meaning from the provided information of each case study and why? What other visual analytics, if any, can be used to generate similar meaning, and why is mapping best suited for this purpose? Is this a sustainable project and what, in terms of its structure, will allow for its continued existence and maintenance?

Working internationally and with varying/limited data sets is difficult. Working within grant structures that are premised on a set of deadlines and deliverables is also demanding. One asset and obstacle of DH is that people question standardization practices and yet we often find ourselves in the practice of attempting to standardize data or the staging of particular forms of information. The other issue is one of audience. Many projects profess to be “for everyone” without realizing that this universalizing gesture makes a set of assumptions about both users and accessibility (you can see this conversation within the responses between the two teams). I am increasingly of the mindset that we need a better and clearer emphasis on intended audiences while we draft possible projects.

In terms of working with StoryMaps, this is a platform that, like many, has shortcomings and strengths. For instance, Sherene wants to emphasize that much of violence occurs in “less than a minute” but the map of Michael Eligon’s death does adequately provide this incorporation of time. On the other hand, the map does make apparent one curiosity: upon his shooting, Eligon is not taken to the nearest hospital (which is also the hospital he had just come out of). Instead, he is taken to a hospital near police headquarters. This is a crucial part of how Sherene discusses the state’s creation of gray spaces which permit violence (i.e. the configuration of hospital spaces into carceral spaces.)