Applying Blockchain to the HBW Project | Ayesha Hardison & Drew Davidson

The History of Black Writing project is an excellent example where an internationally renowned source for information converted from a distributed online database to a blockchain.

A conversation with English Professor Ayesha Hardison, the Director of the History of Black Writing, and Engineering Professor Drew Davidson who implemented the technology.   We explore this unique collaboration between University of Kansas faculty that resulted in applying blockchain to better expose students, instructors and audiences to reading literature by Black authors and further building the community to engage in dialogue about the history and future of the books, recovery and preservation. 

Transcript

Lauren Weymouth [00:00:06  Hi I'm Lauren Weymouth.

And I've got the pleasure and honor of leading UBRI, Ripple's University Blockchain Research Initiative, that supports global campuses adopting, educating, and innovating with blockchain. I love hosting this podcast, All About Blockchain, which reveals what blockchain is good for and what current problems it solves across various sectors to improve our lives.

Today, we're gonna shine a light on the impact blockchain applications are having on data storage. And here with us to tell the story are two professors from the University of Kansas, Ayesha Hardison and Drew Davidson. Professor Hardison is in the Department of English, an accomplished educator, researcher, and author.

And Professor Davidson is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and also the director of Padlock Cybersecurity Lab at the Institute for Information Sciences. They're working together on how the 40-year-old history of Black writing project can grow using blockchain. Drew and Ayesha, welcome to All About Blockchain.

Ayesha Hardison: [00:00:58] Thanks for having us.I'm excited to be here.

Drew Davidson: [00:01:00] Yeah, thank you as well. It's really great to have a conversation about the blockchain and its extension beyond just engineering.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:01:07]So, to jump right in, Ayesha, you're a part of the Department of English at University of Kansas. What makes this department so unique?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:01:13] Well, I think one thing that makes the English department at the University of Kansas unique, as well as the University of Kansas in relationship to English, is that for many years KU had a chancellor whose research  made significant contributions to English studies. So Robert Hemingway was a scholar of Zora Neale Hurston and wrote the first biography of her.

So, that's huge for African American literature and English studies more broadly. And so, to have someone in that senior administration role at a university is a huge boon for an English Department.

I'd say the other aspect that makes English at KU really exciting is that Langston Hughes spent a lot of his time in Lawrence, Kansas, so having him as a figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and a lot of aspects of the university really paid homage to him as a poet and a writer really speaks to the significance of English at KU.

And I'd also say the makeup of the faculty, historically, in the English department at KU has had a lot of strengths in American literature, ethnic American literature, African diaspora literature, including the Caribbean and African American. So, I think all those things really make KU English really exciting and really unique in regards to departments at KU but also universities across the nation.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:02:29] And we're here today to talk about the history of Black Writing Project, which, as a part of your department, Maryemma Graham founded 40 years ago. Tell us a little bit about this project and the development through the last four decades.

Ayesha Hardison: [00:02:41]Yeah. What's also important about the English department at KU is that HBW has been there for over 25 years. HBW has been in existence for 40. We just celebrated our 40th anniversary. And so that also makes the English department a really, key, partner in HBW history as it's continued to grow and evolve.

I'd say, for its four decades of being in existence, HBW is one of the oldest, digital humanities projects. And we've really seen the evolution of the project try to follow and take advantage of innovation in technology. It really started as a database, just a list of novels in African American literature.

the founder, Maryemma Graham, was really invested in making sure that texts weren't lost, that texts continued to be studied, that works out of print, were still accessible. And so, it's moved from, you know, like, a list of texts to thinking about digitization and how preservation works with new technologies, as well as trying to collect metadata on those texts to be able to do and answer the, kind of, big-data questions about the African American literary traditions.

So, we've evolved as technology has evolved. We've, the project and its scope has grown over its four decades. And I say that's, been really important for our sustainability and the continued kind of, evolution of the project.

Lauren Weymouth: [4:01] Yeah, I can really see that. And maybe, Drew, you can spell out for us what problem was... what it... what, what problem was blockchain solving in bringing this technology to the project from taking it from a long-time record-keeping digital program into actually using blockchain and decentralized ledger to hold the information.

Drew Davidson: [4:018] Yeah. The main thing that the blockchain offers is, kind of, these strong guarantees about the unerasability of data and the distributed nature of whatever is being stored on the chain.

The blockchain is a really good match for the Current Archives and Collaboratives Index portion of the system, the CACI.

And essentially, what the CACI is, is it's a way for librarians, or just collection holders of really Black media,it doesn't just have to be literature, but any collection to, kind of, let our system know that this collection is out there, that it exists somewhere. And, it might be a library collection. It might be a very small collection of underappreciated work.

And it really felt like the distributed, decentralized nature of the data itself worked really well for the blockchain model where, you know, you can't bring down the entire network by eliminating a single node. You know, you can't, sort of, erase a single contribution from this system once it's been added. So, the principle of the underlying data and the principle of the blockchain felt like a really good match for each other.

Lauren Weymouth: [5:34] That makes sense. The distributed nature and the immutable aspect. So good. I mean, for those that are not as familiar with the history of Black Writing Project, HBW, the fact that it's adapted to the digital age, what, kind of, data are we talking about? Like, how many titles are in the collection that are being utilized?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:05:50] Yeah. Well  we're at a really exciting and pivotal moment in HBW's, like, cataloging and inventory. Currently, our corpus has over 6,000, nearly 7,000, independent or unique titles in our collection. And as we gain momentum on our digitizing, we currently have over 3,500 digitized titles as well.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:06:15] That is substantial. So, as after working with watching and incorporating them using this technology, is this something that you would recommend to other catalogs to use?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:06:25 ]In some ways, the way the project has evolved we've been ahead of maybe not technology per se, but our understanding of it and access to it, right? So, we've had ideas and a vision for how the project could grow and really work to figure out how that could be accomplished.

In other ways, we've definitely benefited from the expertise of our colleagues and the sciences and engineering and Drew specifically and the platform of blockchain to really think about how we can strengthen our work to make it more accessible. And I think the philosophical questions of blockchain really appear to the mission and premise of HBW, which is innovation, which is preservation, but also thinking about value, right?

Part of HBW was initiated because African American literature was undervalued in various ways. It was understudied. And so, I think, what blockchain affords HBW  in preserving our collections, but also some of the philosophical questions or bigger questions that it asks, I think, are aligned with what we're trying to do with our project in terms of preservation, access, and, and continual innovation.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:07:26] I love the cross-functional nature of this project. Often, you hear about big projects like this, utilizing many different departments, getting together, and, and making it happen. Drew, I'm sure we'd all love to hear the genesis of bringing these digital records onto the blockchain. Like, how did that first conversation come up? And who did you have to convince to do it?

Drew Davidson: [00:07:45] (laughs) yeah., so, you know, one of the things that I think is really nice about, these, these digital systems in general, is that the, the process of bringing something into a digital form, and then bringing it into a blockchain, doesn't have to be a single step. We, kind of, see the blockchain as honestly, as a value add, right? Like, the system works as a monolithic database. And it can work as a monolithic database.

I would encourage anybody thinking about using a blockchain back end or anything to not feel intimidated by having to do it as a single big goal, right? You can, sort of, say, "Let's build up this system. Let's, sort of, you know, design this in such a way that the back end can, kind of, be made flexible. And then when the time is right, and we, kind of, have our legs under us, then we can start putting data into a blockchain.

And we can, sort of, switch out back ends in a fairly straightforward way." So, all of this is, kind of, a precursor to just say, I don't know if this necessarily was one conversation. I think it was the kind of thing where we're like, you know, this system is a really good fit for this technology. And, you know, it's not the kind of thing where you have to throw out everything to use a blockchain.

And I think that's a really important thing, to know is people consider an architecture is it... you don't have to burn down the whole thing to include a blockchain, and, and, and the guarantees that can be provided don't have to be, kind of, core features of the system, despite their importance, the entire system does not have to be designed around a blockchain to make use of it.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:09:21] I think it's really important what you said about it being a value add, I mean, not just for academic projects, but for corporates out there looking to investigate blockchain and its use case, but maybe not being sure if it's the right time or the right fit to realize that you don't have to throw out the whole project or initiative. It's something that you can add on to make systems more efficient and utilize all the strengths that blockchain offers. okay.

Drew Davidson: [00:05:9:45]I think so. And, you know, I think the APIs have never been easier to use, right? I think that the library support is getting better and better. I hope the understanding and the evangelism has increased to the point where it doesn't feel like it has to be this super-nerdy leap anymore, relatively speaking.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:10:00] Yeah. And, you know, you started this project a few years ago. Tell us a little bit about the journey. What are some lessons that you've learned that you'd share with others, looking to convert their projects or add on blockchain?

Drew Davidson: [00:10:10] So, one of the things that I would say is that it is really cool for technologists and, sort of, engineering experts to be able to have the direct blockchain interface and for the system to be able to work in a distributed way, but I also think that it's really important, especially in an interdisciplinary project, to understand that not everyone is going to want that interface, that a blockchain-based system, does not have to be entirely, you know, federated or decentralized or whatever.

You can have a traditional web interface that is querying a blockchain-backed back end. And everything works. And the regular user doesn't have to worry about it. And everything looks like every other website. It's nice that the technology can bridge the divide where people that care about it and care about those, sort of, provable guarantees can get them, but people that want to access this data and don't necessarily need to install like a whole tech stack of their own can still do it.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:11:08] That's great. So, Ayesha, you talked about the accessibility. So, if I'm someone that wants to look at the collection, how do I do that?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:11:14]Well, this fall, we plan to launch a really comprehensive website that will, uh, be media-rich in that it will include podcasts, it will include data visualizations, drawing from HBW's corpus and the data that we curate about it, in addition to the CACI website, which will highlight archives across the country from, historically Black colleges and institutions as well as predominantly White, institutions as well.

And one thing that we're also excited about is not only just to highlight these collections, but also to make people aware of them, that they're usable, that they exist, and how much they can add to our understanding of African American literature, but African American culture more broadly. So people will be able to select filters and get recommendations on books to read.

and so, it's exciting to think about  the access for different, kind of, users, not just scholars, but also students or librarians, or just the everyday reader, will be able to gain a little peek in what we've been collecting for 40 years, and to see that materialize in this ex-... what I think is a very exciting way.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:12:22] Do any of the literary figures that you work with know that you're preserving the work and making it openly accessible using this technology?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:12:30]I don't think any of the writers that we have included in our corpus know about the technology that we're using. I think they are aware of our efforts to preserve and our efforts to promote in a, kind of, public humanities way, but I think that knowledge, and exposure to blockchain will come with [00:18:00] the launch of the website more.

I think who do have more of an awareness and a familiarity with this kind of technology are the scholars that will engage our website,  so the digital humanity scholars who are doing other literary studies projects and who may be using blockchain themselves or other kinds of platforms or technologies. I think they're more familiar with it and will be really excited to engage it.

And I think, we will increasingly expose the writers  in our corpus the living ones that is, to the work as well. I also suspect, in many ways, our students are far more ahead of us. We have a lot of students working with HBW. and they tend to be on the cutting edge of things all the time. And so, I think, they will see it, they will get it, and in many ways, are many, many steps ahead of where we are in terms of utilization and promotion.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:13:48] I would have to say that's true on a lot of campuses, but specifically, your students in the, in the KUBI, Kansas University Blockchain club, ran a hackathon a couple weekends ago that our engineers, attended, participated, and they came back raving about the level of their understanding and participation and innovation in the space. Just really... Just wanna hire them all really (laughs).

Ayesha Hardison: (laughs).

Lauren Weymouth: [00:14:08] And it's so great to hear that you look at the launch as a way to educate people, not just on, "Hey, this is available to you now," and the accessibility and turning people on to these... the corpus, the great works of art, but also "Hey, there's this technology that we are now using to make this accessible."

Ayesha Hardison: Mm-hmm.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:14:25] I think it's a great way, with the use case, to teach people about what it is and how it works.

Ayesha Hardison: [00:14:30] Part of HBW's mission is also professional development. I mean, we're invested in that as well, and not just, something that we're doing, but that could be replicated elsewhere, that other people can use for their own projects. And we, we hope to facilitate that as well with the launch of our website.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:14:44] Very cool. We, kind of, covered this, but I'm gonna ask the question a different way to see if different things come up. How do you integrate knowledge from different fields, such as computer science and engineering, to innovate blockchain applications across an English Department?

Drew Davidson: [00:14:47] Yeah. I think that just in terms of professional development and the types of work that students are going to do after they graduate, it is really important to get a full picture of the domain that you are studying. And one of the things that I'm really proud of with this project is that, all of the computer science development has been done by students, graduate students, and even some undergraduates as well.

And I think that just exposure to Black literature and giving them the understanding of the importance of the work they're doing is, really helps them, and it's really an important thing for engineers to understand that there's really very few pure applications of engineering for engineering's sake. The type of work that we are doing here is in service to the English department.

And it's, it's very cool. And I think the students really love learning about blockchains, and really love learning about web development and all that stuff, but, you know, they're also, I think, learning that good projects come from, kind of, good underlying applications.

Ayesha Hardison: [00:16:00] I think... Yeah. And I think a vision that we have at HBW is to integrate this more in our undergraduate classroom, so that we see English having interdisciplinary relationships with the medical field, for example, or with legal studies, for example.

And one thing that we're envisioning HBW is how to have a collaboration, like, like, that we model, that Drew and Maryemma and I model with Drew, to have it in our classrooms with our undergrads, so that they can get some exposure to this technology or blockchain or engineering, right, and that even that that can be co-taught, right, as a model for both fields, or many fields, to engage these questions and to see, like, where we share and where we overlap, as well as how we can innovate and expand and rethink some of the disciplinary questions or methods, et cetera.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:16:53] That's very cool. That really opens the scope of the project. How, how many people on campus or off are part of the research center?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:16:58] We have  about 25 student, staff members, roughly divided, maybe a little less than half graduate students, probably more undergraduates at this point, with one project manager, and then two staff members who are not students. So, that entails the project, in addition to myself and Maryemma the founder, is always still around and on hand as well.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:17:20] That's great. And are these students working on it as part of their studies, or is it, like, an extracurricular activity?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:17:28] they are, they are employed as staff with the project, but often, we see with our graduate students that they do use the things that they're learning at HBW, the opportunities they... that they have with working with different faculty and different units as well as different universities as part of their graduate studies training, that they get a lot of experience, searching for things, researching things, trying to  communicate to different audiences, for example, organizing programming.

With our undergraduate students, we may give them smaller aspects of responsibilities and tasks related to the bigger project of HBW, but I continue to talk to undergrads who take what they've learned in researching this one thing or having to gather some information and applying it to their papers, for example.

And just recently, one of my undergraduates said that she was already anticipating, an undergraduate thesis, and how she was gonna use what she had learned working with HBW and apply it to something that she planned to write in the future.

So, I have to say that those moments are really rewarding for me, that they may not all be working in African American literature, or have been exposed to blockchain, or even know how to use Adobe, maybe, right, but through their experiences with the HBW. And some of it is, like, go learn, do this, that we don't even know how to do.

They come, they go, they learn it, they come back and teach us, and then they apply it. And all the time, they don't know how they're being professionally developed, but we can see it in the ways in which they talk about the project, the pride they take in it, and then how they go on and apply it in their classrooms, and in their, their future, professional goals and aspirations.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:19:04] I love that. Drew, what advice would you have for students and developers interested in using blockchain to further their projects?

Drew Davidson: [00:20:25] So, I would say, you know, start up your own little project. Just do something that seems fun. Look at how easy it is to get a little cluster set up. Uh, you know, the level of support that's out there is actually really high right now. And a lot of it can be done really without, like, crazy resources, right?

I think one of the misconceptions about blockchain, because it is so tied to cryptocurrency applications, is that its scope is really focused on cryptocurrency, or that it's, sort of, a very money-intensive process to get going, but in my experience, that hasn't really been true. Like, it's possible to do your own little blockchain project, and then see it scaled up.

And we've seen that. We did this hackathon, not that long ago, single people, uh, or just teams of maybe two or three students are making really great blockchain projects and, sort of, showing applications in very little time, you know, literally 72 hours. So, I would say just, just go for it. Just see what you can do. Play around with it. It's such a core part of computer science in general.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:21:12] That's great advice. Ayesha, you, you mentioned other events you're getting invited to talk, on campus. I had the pleasure of visiting Spencer Museum of Art in the fall that extended the goals of the project's text archives of Black storytellers to include art and visual culture. Maybe you can tell us about other events held on campus that are celebrating this milestone of 40 years.

Ayesha Hardison: [00:21:31] One of the things that we did in partnering with the Spencer Museum of Art around the Black Writing exhibit was to make sure [00:28:30] that we had activities in the museum's space. so, coming out of a tradition in KU's English department, we held a marathon reading where we read Parable of the Sower, which was the KU common book, and Spencer Museum of Art also had a KU common work of art on display during this period.

We did a marathon reading in the museum space of Octavia Butler's book, where, essentially, we read the book out loud continuously until we finish it. And we had different people come into the museum space to sign up in advance to read, but sometimes, that didn't always work out. So, sometimes, you were called on to read if you were there. some, people just came and sat and listened.

And so, again, coming out of this history in the English department of doing these marathon readings, we wanted to return to that, but also have the, kind of, beauty surrounding us in the museum space and reading Octavia Butler and to really, kind of, visualize the world building that she manifests in that novel. So, that was one activity that we had.

The other one we had was actually virtual, but it was a discussion, with several scholars that were invested in Black women's writing. So, we decided to highlight, given that HBW is celebrating 40 years, that this, 40 years ago, was also a critical moment in recovering, um, African American women's writing.

So, we partnered with, Angelyn Mitchell at Howard University, and Tenille Taylor, as well as Courtney Thorsson who's recently published a book, The Sisterhood, was coming out and just had a conversation. And while we were highlighting those, kind of, key works that those scholars had created, we were also just having a love fest about Black women's writing and what was happening 40 years ago and how those words continue to resonate and remain relevant in our contemporary culture.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:23:45] And just the way you're making your website media-rich that's launching in the fall, you've made the campus event-rich. That's super fun. 

Ayesha Hardison: Thank you.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:23:54] We already know that listeners can find more out about this project this upcoming fall of 2024, when you launch the website. And we'll add the link to our podcast episode.

Lauren Weymouth: Anything else that we haven't discussed that you'd like our listeners to know about?

Ayesha Hardison: [00:24:09]Perhaps one thing that I wanted to emphasize, but maybe, uh, I didn't emphasize a lot, is the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship, I think, is, uh,] beneficial. I've learned so much from it. so, I guess just the opportunity to thank Drew for all he's contributed to the project. There are ways in which he streamlines our processes., he keeps us on task informs us.

And we just think bigger ideas, working with someone in engineering. He's been a great contribution in addition to our team, what we consider our team. and I just wanna highlight how, I think, important that is.

And it's, it's sometimes very rare and difficult to foster that type of partnership, but it has, definitely benefited HBW. And just wanted to acknowledge that it's worth putting in the effort to do that in the humanities, because there's a lot to be gained. And we think that we have something to offer the sciences as well.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:25:04] That's beautiful advice.

Drew Davidson: [00:25:06] absolutely the same from the engineering side, it's been an absolute pleasure working with HBW, working with Ayesha, working with Maryemma, sort of, giving meaning to some of the work that we're doing and showing real-world applications of technologies.

I think it's really expanded our understanding of what we can do with blockchain and just also just with student developers.  And it's been really great having that extra perspective and having the opportunity to do an interdisciplinary collaboration. And, you know, it's fueled by UBRI, right? That's that is one thing that I also wanna acknowledge, is, like, one of the things that makes this go is the ability to support students.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:25:46] Yeah. industry, university collaborations are so important for  furthering, projects like this, Your efforts at interactive research and public engagement are so inspiring. And we can really hear how they're impactful.

Lauren Weymouth: We are so lucky that smart and dedicated humans like Professor Graham and Professor Hardison not only work on preserving Black literature, but generate a metadata schema to increase the number of Black author texts in the study of Digital Humanities. 

Thank you Drew for being the technical background making this actually happen and come to fruition.

Drew, Ayesha, thanks for participating in this episode of All About Blockchain, and for taking the initiative to engage with new technology to tackle challenges with data storage, leveraging the benefits of blockchain for good. We look forward to learning updates on how this use case positively expands our community of scholars and researchers and the world.

Drew Davidson: [00:26:32] Thank you so much for having us.

Ayesha Hardison: [00:26:33] Thank you.

Lauren Weymouth: [00:26:35]  Listeners, thank you for your ears and for the helpful feedback to my ubri@ripple.com e-mail. If you have any questions about this episode or ideas for future episodes, please reach out. Until next time.