Our new researcher spotlight highlights individuals making innovative uses of archival materials.
This edition profiles projects by UCLA History Professor Tobias Higbie.
Words by Courtney Dean.
Professor Tobias Higbie is the Director of the Public History Initiative and the Faculty Chair of Labor & Workplace Studies at UCLA. He utilizes digital humanities approaches to labor history and labor studies, taking archival material and reimagining it as network data. Higbie is also involved in the collaborative community archiving project Organizing the Southland.
American Labor Who’s Who Database/Networked Labor
The American Labor Who’s Who database features data from the 1925 directory of the same name. This influential reference book lists activists in the fields of trade unionism, immigrant rights, civil liberties, cooperatives, and progressive and radical politics. By digitizing and making the data available to students and researchers to manipulate, different social networks and connections emerge.
The Networked Labor site contains visualizations of both the Who’s Who dataset, as well as the American Labor Press Directory (1925). As Higbie states on the website, “Linking this data to other publicly accessible resources holds the potential to connect more people to the history of social movements in North America.”
A network chart representing the organizational links of immigrant labor activist Pauline Newman.
“Street Theater at Toyota,” Justice for Janitors History Project, accessed April 4, 2016, http://socialjusticehistory.org/projects/justiceforjanitors/items/show/173
Organizing the Southland
Organizing the Southland: Social Movement Unionism in Neoliberal Los Angeles is a collaboration between United Service Workers West (SEIU), Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), UNITE-HERE Local 11 and the UCLA History Department, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Labor Center, Library Special Collections. It “aims to document this dramatic history in partnership with unions and community organizations, and to support research on the history of Los Angeles’s diverse working class.” The project includes archival collections such as United Service Workers West (SEIU) and the Justice for Janitors History Project.
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