Layered Lives (Stanford University Press, 2022)
Taylor Arnold, Courtney Rivard, and Lauren Tilton
The Southern Life History Project, a Federal Writers’ Project initiative, put unemployed writers to work during the Great Depression by capturing the stories of everyday people across the Southeast through a new form of social documentation called “life histories.”
Layered Lives recovers the history of the Southern Life History Project (SLHP) through an interdisciplinary approach that combines close readings of archival material with computational methods that analyze the collection at scale. The authors grapple with the challenges of what counts as social knowledge, how to accurately represent social conditions, who could produce such knowledge, and who is and is not represented. Embedded within such debates are also struggles over what counts as data, evidence, and ways of knowing.
Layered Lives is a custom-built static web project. The project authors designed and built the project in line with guidelines I created for Stanford University Press to ensure the project’s archivability. The guidelines acted as an early intervention to what could have been a much longer production process. Most projects take up to six months in production, whereas this one required very little technical cleanup. Copyediting and archiving were the main focus points of this publication. The three archived versions—documentation, digital repository collection, and web archive—are standard preservation approaches I apply to all projects in production, ensuring that as soon as they are published, alternative versions of them exist to roll over to once the live version ceases to function in the ever evolving browser landscape.