Review: The New York Times “Unpublished Black History” Project

This review was initially written for an undergraduate seminar about the digital humanities. It has been lightly edited.

This February, the New York Times introduced a project called “Unpublished Black History”. In honour of Black History Month, Times staff collaborated with each other and their readers to exhibit, contextualize and reflect on images from the Times archives — the online archive is known as the TimesMachine — that were previously unpublished. The project exhibits images of famous African Americans like Arthur Ashe, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahalia Jackson and Sammy Davis Jr., while highlighting significant moments in the history of black civil rights. “Unpublished Black History” is a journalistic project instead of an academic one, but a lot of the literature about the nature of academic digital projects can be applied to evaluate it. “Unpublished Black History” is an excellent project because it has an attractive, easy to use interface, utilizes the newspaper’s archives very well, provides original content and engages users to provide feedback and create content. Its major flaw is the paywall that limits the amount of people who can see the project, which directly affects the quality of the project since users are also content creators.

“Unpublished Black History” is a collaborative project with Rachel L. Swarns, Darcy Eveleigh and Damien Cave as the main authors. Swarns is a Metro columnist at the Times, Eveleigh is a Photography Editor for the newspaper, and Cave is Deputy Editor for Digital for the Times National desk.[1] Swarns and Cave write the text below the photos to explain what is happening in the image, and why it is significant to black history. The blurbs often contain hyperlinks to related Times stories, but sometimes they link to other sources like the Dallas News. They often include some introspective commentary on behalf of the Times, considering why the photos were not published before. The introduction of the project explains that the unpublished photos point to the institutional bias from editors who may not have deemed stories about black people important.[2] Eveleigh adds that the paper used to be very text-heavy, reducing space to publish photos.[3] The Times trio also collaborates with users by allowing them to provide thoughts and feedback on the project. Feedback that offers helpful historical context, or offers interesting insights, can often be implemented into posts.

“One can, within seconds, search the Times archives themselves, view photos, and read commentary on them.”

The project has three main components: the timeline, the slideshow and the TimesMachine. The timeline is the home page, where photos are added daily with context blurbs. The timeline is presented in order of most recent to least recently published photo. For digital subscribers, myself included, users are notified as to how many posts have been published since their last log-in, and each new post says “New since your last visit.” Users have the option to share specific posts to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, reddit, or by email. The slideshow option is accessible from the timeline. Clicking on a photo will open up a slideshow where users can navigate through all the published images with arrow keys, arrows on the screen, or by clicking on the photo in the slideshow. The slideshow gives a shorter version of the blurb found on the timeline, and returns the user to their place on the timeline once she reaches the last photo.

The TimesMachine is the digital archive of the Times, and most of the posts on “Unpublished Black History” provide a link to a story related to the published photo, which can be accessed on the TimesMachine. The archive allows users to scroll through scanned copies of the newspaper page by page, with the ability to zoom in and out. When opening the link, the story related to the photo will be highlighted in a white background, with the rest of the paper in grey. Users can click on other stories, which will then be highlighted. The TimesMachine has a sidebar that gives information about the selected article, like the headline, sub-headline, byline, pages the article is found in the newspaper, and subject tags, which help users find articles about similar topics in the archives. Users can also download the selected article as a PDF file and share their findings on Facebook, Twitter, email, or through a shareable URL. The project also encourages users to sign up for an email newsletter which summarizes the new information added to the project on a weekly basis.

This project is excellent for many reasons. First, its design is simple and minimalist, which allows users to focus on the content. The email newsletter and the update notifications are useful for keeping users engaged, and reminding them that new content is being added regularly. The “share” widgets are also simple to use, making it easy to make others aware of the project. Navigation is very simple and transitioning from the timeline to the slideshow to the TimesMachine is almost seamless. The content itself is excellent, especially because it is multi-layered. Contemporary journalists provide context for images that have never been published, making them extremely valuable historically. These images are connected to published work in the archives, which offer decades worth of information that is extremely easy to interact with. The last layer is the users, who provide information to the Times to improve the project. These three layers of information make this project greatly useful, interesting, and a massive contribution to American black history.

One the weakness of the project is accessibility. The Times has a metered paywall, which allows non-subscribers to access to a limited number of articles per month[4]. Users who are not subscribers have complained that they cannot access the material once they have reached their limit[5], and the TimesMachine is only accessible for digital subscribers. This limits the number of people who can see the project and contribute to it. The same way that the Times takes down the paywall for coverage of crises, like the Paris attacks[6] of November 2015, they should do the same for this project to ensure that as many people as possible see it. Exposure to such a valuable project may encourage non-subscribers to subscribe, especially if they are able to interact with the impressive archives.

The advantage of a project like this, compared to a book or a journal article is that the project can be updated constantly, always remaining relevant and adding new information. This concept of “perpetual beta” allows projects to be “re-factored, remade and extended,”[7] which leads to improvement. This allows for an enhanced peer review method[8], with millions able to make comments and suggestions, instead of a small number of scholars. As discussed before, the multi-layered nature of the project is what makes it so interesting, and its capabilities are exclusive to digital work.[9] One can, within seconds, search the Times archives themselves, view photos, and read commentary on them. This cannot be replicated in a book; the archives, for example, would probably only be referenced in footnotes. Even if images from the archives were printed in a book, a digital project like “Unpublished Black History” allows users to access the entire archive, and use tags to find similar information. It also makes it easier to collect information from non-professionals. In academia — especially the social sciences — and journalism, it is common to survey and interview citizens who may or may not be interested in the author’s project. “Unpublished Black History” gets feedback and contributions from people who find the project and voluntarily contribute, which likely provides more informative, engaging and interesting commentary.

The main challenges of digital projects seem to be matters of finance. For the Times to exist, it needs subscribers, and subscribers must get incentives that separate them from non-subscribers. The TimesMachine is an important element of this project, and non-subscribers cannot access it at all. Like books, somebody must pay for the labour and the product, and a digital platform does not change that need. In fact, it can add to financial costs due to the need to hire programmers and other workers who may not be needed to produce a book. In academia, this means that scholars must seek larger grants to complete digital projects.

These three layers of information make this project greatly useful, interesting, and a massive contribution to American black history.

In conclusion, “Unpublished Black History” succeeds as an interesting, multilayered and interactive digital project that is easy to use. Its paywall poses an accessibility issue, but this problem is not unique to digital, and has no clear solution: labour and production will always cost money. Digital projects are challenged by traditional notions of credibility. Books and articles, especially in prestigious journals, are seen the most credible forms of scholarly work, but the introduction of academic projects of the same quality as “Unpublished Black History” could change that. Todd Presner writes that “[t]ools shape knowledge, and knowledge shapes tools.”[10] This project exemplifies that sentiment: a digital platform allows users to learn about history in new ways, and this experience could encourage more innovative ways of presenting historical information.