Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

About the Projects

These projects were designed by interns with Boston College's Digital Scholarship group over the summer of 2021. The projects are intended to serve as examples of potential project paths for students taking Digital Humanities courses at the university. They also serve to highlight the various digital resources available at Boston College's libraries.

Both "Law & Order BPS: Police Presence in High Schools During the Desegregation of Boston Public Schools, 1976" and "The Monitor Report Timeline" draw upon digitized portions of the Citywide Coordinating Council Records, held in the John J. Burns Library at Boston College.

"Law & Order BPS: Police Presence in High Schools During the Desegregation of Boston Public Schools, 1976" uses Tableau to create data visualizations of police presence and student behavior at three Boston high schools. This project was created by Kelly Lyons as a History PhD Candidate at Boston College. Her dissertation, "The Reinvention of Tradition: Everyday Nationalism and the Making of the American Citizen, 1890-1950," considers how right-wing organizations developed patriotic traditions to shape the way Americans conceived of their national identity. She earned a digital humanities certificate from the HILT Institute and has a background in data visualizations and network analysis.

"The Monitor Report Timeline" was created by Kenneth Haley, an English PhD Candidate at the Morrissey College of Arts and Science. It utilizes the Knight Labs' Timeline JS to explore the ways in which the various reports interact and overlap to gain a better understanding of their relationship to one another.