- Go to the APWA website: http://apw.dhinitiative.org/.
This week, we begin one of our major scholarly contributions this term. We will each become contributors to the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA). The APWA was created in 2009 by Professor Doran Larson of Hamilton College, originally for a single book project. But the submissions and interest in the APWA outgrew the book project. Here is the project description from the website:
The American Prison Writing Archive evolved from a book project completed in 2014 with the publication of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, the largest collection to date of non-fiction writing by currently incarcerated Americans writing about their experience inside. The submission deadline for Fourth City passed in August 2012, yet submissions never ceased. The imperative to build the APWA grew from the clear evidence that, once invited, incarcerated people would not give up the chance to tell their stories. The APWA currently hosts over 2,100 essays, enough work to fill over thirty volumes the size of Fourth City (a 338-page, 7”x10” text).
Essays are solicited through prisoner-support newsletters and a call for essays in Prison Legal News. Writers then write to request our permissions-questionnaire (PQ). The PQ is then returned with essays on anything that falls within the wide field described in the PQ. All submissions are read and, with very rare exceptions, scanned, and ingested. The information gathered from the PQ enables faceted searching. All handwritten essays are also transcribed—and can be transcribed by any visitor—to make them fully searchable. Anyone with first-hand experience inside US carceral institutions today is eligible to submit essays. This includes prison employees and volunteers, who materially shape the day-to-day conditions in which incarcerated people live, and who are in turn deeply affected by their work. A truly inclusive vision of life inside requires the testimony of everyone who lives, works, or volunteers in prisons today. In this light, readers will note the under-representation of women, trans, and gender nonconforming people in the archive. We invite all APWA visitors who work with or know incarcerated people to help us in increasing contributions from these populations, as well as from prison workers and volunteers.
Amid the unprecedented American experiment in mass-scale incarceration, the APWA hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts and voices of incarcerated writers. At the same time, like other witness literatures, writers from across the nation yield insights into the common traits of their experience. Visitors can search by state, author attributes, etc. (See and explore this page’s left sidebar.) They can also search by keywords, and, after a keyword search, use the right sidebar for more specific author attributes. With these tools, visitors can not only read widely; they can curate their own virtual collections.
The mission of the APWA is to replace speculation on and misrepresentation of prisons, imprisoned people, and prison workers with first-person witness by those who live and work on the receiving end of American criminal justice. No single essay can tell us all that we need to know. But a mass-scale, national archive can begin to strip away widely circulated myths and replace them with some sense of the true human costs of the current legal order. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing and disseminating the work of imprisoned people, prison workers and volunteers, we hope to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know prisons best.
For this assignment, we will each select an essay that has not yet been transcribed from the archive’s website, follow the APWA’s editorial transcription rules and transcribe the essay (meaning, type it out in a Word processor), and submit that transcription to Professor Larson to add to the archive. Our transcriptions will make those essays searchable, which increases access to them and their ability to help tell the story of those in prison who wrote them.
- Step 1: Select an essay that is at least 5 pages long to be transcribed from the list at this link here.
- Step 2: On this Google Sheet, write your name next to an account ID, make note of that ID and login information, and indicate the title of the letter you will be transcribing. You must transcribe a unique letter that no other student has selected. Note: you will need to log in with your SCU ID to edit the sheet.
- Step 3: Click on the essay title link to see the handwritten letter (aka, manuscript). I suggest downloading and printing a copy to use in addition to the online copy.
- Step 4: Download the “Transcribing Guidelines” and “Transcription Instructions” documents. They are in our Camino Files in the APWA folder under those filenames.
- Transcribe the letter precisely according to those instructions. The APWA will reject transcriptions that do not follow their guidelines, so there are real stakes here.
- We will peer-review our transcriptions.
- Your final transcription is due on Friday, October 25, uploaded to Camino by midnight.
- On Monday, October 28, a 4-page reflection essay is due by midnight on what you learned from the experience of transcribing your essay and how it relates to our course material thus far. Upload your essay to Camino.
Grading
The transcription project is worth a substantial portion of your course grade: 20%. That reflects the editorial thought and care, peer-review, and reflection writing process that, put together, will function as a “mid-term” project. Grading will be as follows:
- 50 points: You will be graded on your transcription accuracy, editorial quality, and ability to follow the transcription rules of the APWA. If your transcription is rejected by the APWA, this can have a major impact on your grade.
- 50 points: 4-page reflection essay, which must include citations. Your essay will be graded on the substance of your reflection on what you learned from the letter and your transcription process, how this assignment relates specifically to other material we have read this term, and the editorial polish of the essay (it must be well-edited, organized, and include a works cited list in MLA style).