Digital Research Process Jerry Chen

My research process started off in the Word Document provided by David Busch of individuals and organizations that were impactful to the civil rights movement. I was drawn towards the bottom to 2 organizations, the "Empire State Foundation of Colored Women's Clubs" and the "International Council of Women of the Darker Races". These groups stood out to me as I was interested in the intersection between race and gender in the civil rights movement and the impact that other minorities had on equality. I went through to each of the suggested databases that Dr. Busch listed and input both names into the search query. I only got results from a few databases, namely the Chicago Defender, the Black Studies Center, and the Oxford African American Studies Center. The latter had very few exhibit sources and as a result, was almost completely useless to me.

From the remaining 2 databases, I was able to pick out a list of articles from newspapers that could be useful and eventually narrowed the number down to 2 articles. One about the Foundation and the other about the Council. After reading through both, I managed to pick out the second article as it had a greater emphasis on the international impact that the Council had.

From here I realized that none of the sources that I had found were at all related to images and so I went back to the databases to keep searching. I even went to digital projects and performed the same queries and found no relevant results. As a last-ditch effort, I went to the Oxford African American Studies Center and went through the non-exhibit sources and found that one of the essays on there, an essay about the antilynching movement, had a few exhibit sources in the form of pictures. After deliberating between the 2 of them, I found that the picture of women marching and carrying signs carried with it more power and showed the determination of the women to protect theirs and other minorities' rights.

Overall, my research went smoothly with a slight hitch when it came to searching for an image source, however thanks to my wide berth of searching I was able to relatively easily come up with a solution to my problem and was able to quickly build a pool of sources and narrow them down to specific, relevant and useful exhibit sources.

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