Curatorial Statement

This exhibit includes issues from the collection that best represent the chosen themes. Supplemental photographs were found online and accessed in person at the Briscoe Center; ALT text for all of these images was also included. Inclusion practices were focused on representing historical topics, while exclusions were made to present a digestible amount of information. We chose CollectionBuilder to present this information for two reasons: it allows us to present the material in a way that is free and easily accessible by the public, and it allows users to explore the material in multiple ways beyond plain text, specifically through a map and timeline.

Our project goals revolved around best demonstrating the themes we chose to highlight. Given the scope of the collection, this involved excluding various issues to accentuate the chosen issues and themes in the exhibit. We discussed whether it was ethical to censor the newspapers; this discourse is predicated on potentially preventing someone from reaping something harmful versus displaying the events and opinions in an honest way.

The group’s positionality on the subjects of African American Suffrage, the Military Reconstruction Act and the Southern Lost Cause Mentality is reflected in our deliberate inclusion of all issues that best reflect these topics. Our goal in this exhibition is to show these topics as were discussed in The Vicksburg Daily Times, as we believe it is a disservice to the preservation of cultural heritage to censor these topics. The only bias we have against the collection is our general disagreement with the sentiments expressed in the paper. Ultimately, we did not express this disagreement in the exhibit content, nor did we censor any content.

AI tools were used (GPT-5, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code) to help choose the best items for the collection and to add custom functionality to the website beyond what the CollectionBuilder-GH template offers. This includes OCR transcript highlighting from search terms on the Browse page, fuzzy find in Browse page, context added to map cards to justify their location if outside of Vicksburg, a custom Themes page that takes the user to a filtered Browse page, and added OCR transcript to a drop down menu on each individual file item cards. A human-in-the-loop verified the integrity of the outputs.