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Welcome to Data Today with Dan Klein, a podcast from Zühlke.
We're living in a world of opportunities. But to fully realise them, we have to reshape the way we innovate.
We need to stop siloing data, ring-fencing knowledge, and thinking in traditional value chains.
That's what this podcast is about. Every two weeks, we take a look at data outside the box.
Join us to learn how inspiring individuals from diverse fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data to realise their greatest opportunities.
Zühlke is a global innovation service provider. We turn big ideas into working solutions that deliver positive and sustainable value.
Dan Klein:
Hello, and welcome to Data Today, brought to you by Zühlke. I'm your host, Dan Klein, and I look after everything, data and AI, at Zühlke. We are living in a world of opportunities, but to fully realize them, we have to reshape the way we innovate. We need to stop siloing data, bring fencing knowledge, and looking at traditional value chains. And that's what this podcast is about. We're taking a look at data outside the box to see how amazing individuals from disparate fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data, the challenges they are overcoming, and what we can all learn from them.
This week, we are taking a look at something a little out of the box, or rather something in several thousand boxes. The Getty Research Institute has started an ambitious digitization project alongside the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture. In a $30 million scheme, the Getty is digitizing an archive of over 4 million photographs from the Jet and Ebony Magazines. It's considered one of the premier archives of African-American cultural history in the US. The Getty Research Institute is building a portal to showcase the collection to students and researchers, and it's going to be incredible as it develops over the coming years. Now, this has been a lot more than a massive digitization project. It's creating and protecting cultural and historical narratives. It's giving the data meaning. We're joined today by Dr. LeRonn Brooks, research curator at the Getty Research Institute to talk about human history and the insight as data.
LeRonn Brooks:
Well, Dan, it takes a team. So as a curator who helps acquire these materials, it takes catalogers, it takes collections managers, it takes registrars, it takes movers, it takes a whole team. And so something like the Johnson Publishing Company archive, 5 million images. Where we're processing, but it takes the experts on the chain of processing to make it available to the public. And so something like that may take almost a decade to process. And so the things I bring in, it'll be a whole new generation of kids coming out of college who will benefit from it. And so it's really efforts toward a better future, if you want to look at it that way. It goes through many hands, but these are experts who, working in a team to process it, to make it available in person and online. And so it's really teamwork, Dan. It's really teamwork.
Dan Klein:
So now we've got this team. Now we've got it accessible by people. I sense from your background and from your journey that you are still trying to create narratives with these collections that you're bringing in. So how should it shape what we think about today?
LeRonn Brooks:
Dan, I'm going to back this way up. So for instance, I studied genealogy, meaning the study of one's family or one's line. And there was a point where the only ancestor I could find was on a census record. And this young child became a number because this child was property. I come from enslaved people in America. And so in order to find that child again, I would have to look through property records in the town in Alabama where my family is from. And beyond that, it's an aspect of imagination because I can't track it back to Africa unless I find a ship manifest. You see? And so there's an aspect of who we are, or our legacies, that is an aspect of the imagination because we can't make the material ties that go back. So when we think about what an archive is. An archive is leading us on this line of truth toward the imagination, because in some particular way, we are beyond the physical record.
Dan Klein:
But I'm interested in your story here because there's another narrative here, which is around the dehumanization, the creating of numbers and property in Alabama in your generation's past. And that narrative and explaining that narrative and broadening that narrative, that's part of what you are trying to do here with the archives in terms of bringing some of these cultural, historic issues to life. Are we trying to learn lessons from the past here? Is that where we're going here with what you're doing?
LeRonn Brooks:
This is a heck of an origin story here, Dan.
Dan Klein:
I like to ask the difficult questions, LeRonn.
LeRonn Brooks:
That's okay. Well, my work is in no small degree influenced by the fact that my history, or my want to know my deep history, is really shrouded in sort of shadows because America is still a very young nation. And I am the first generation in my family to be born outside of segregation, and so there is a real need for me to do the kind of work by which we do not forget where we come from. We do not forget our past. And so by our past, I don't just mean my familial past, I mean the lessons from how my family was treated. As a way to not forget, that we do not repeat things like enslavement, that we do not repeat things like segregationist laws. It's really important that legacy be protected because they teach us where we come from and they can inspire us in terms of thinking through them, where we're going.
Dan Klein:
You talk at lengths in a lot of your commentary about the use of imagery. So I'm interested in how you think about the use of visual imagery as a way of really setting the scene for narrative, in terms of the really big archive you've got of images. How do you pick up the sort of 1-2-3-4-5 top images to really make a point, if you like, and pull together a narrative and show off a collection for what it is, but also make quite a profound societal point if you like? How does that work for you?
LeRonn Brooks:
Well, images matter, and here I'm thinking politically. So if you think of Jim Crow, Jim Crow segregation was... The character, Jim Crow was a minstrel character. It was a white man dressing up in black space to act in the sort of black cultural ways. And so we talk about how a law was basically named after that character. And so the dehumanization or the visual dehumanization of African-Americans was then used to characterize a system of segregation as laws. And so images matter. And so when we think about how visual art or images from popular culture in that particular intersection, if we do not examine them, if we do not understand the ways in which they can be enacted politically to enact the best in us, but also to empower the worst in us, what does it mean for this democracy?
And so images have a direct relationship. Well, the power of images has a direct relationship to the character of our democracy and the character of the laws that shape our lives. And so starting from there, what does it mean that African-American images and popular culture have been used against us? And so just starting from there, for me, the kind of work that I want to do is to help shape this democracy toward a better path.
Dan Klein:
So let me call these images, they're data points in a time span, aren't they? In some senses, your collections are, you're trying to surface data points which wouldn't necessarily be referenced in popular culture and then surface them as counter narratives to try and offset some of the popular culture data points that already exist. Have I characterized that correctly?
LeRonn Brooks:
Yes. And also Dan, the archives, in and of themselves, by the fact that they exist, are basically a challenge to the racist perceptions of African-Americans. So there's the things that can be done with archives, but then there's the fact that these archives exist, in and of themselves, beyond any kind of interpretation. That's a coup against history.
Dan Klein:
Why do these archives matter to you? Because you're clearly very passionate about these archives. So what is it in particular that's getting you really excited about what you're seeing?
LeRonn Brooks:
An archive is a record of human memory. And I look at, in the broad sense, I look at my work as saving human memory, preserving the deep history of human memory, but through the lens of artists. Every time I moved in, there's four boxes I don't use, but they have conference badges, they have letters, or whatever. But every time I look, there's more boxes. And I'm thinking, "Why do I have these boxes?" They have no practical use, but they have all of these records in them. "Oh, it's a record of my existence through paper, through prints, through correspondence, through all the kinds of things that we do every day." We converse with people through these written and material ways that leave a record for story, and so understand what's the context of one's life.
And so it's a deeply human endeavor to sit down with someone who is ready to talk to me about, "How do we preserve this record of my existence as an academic, as an artist, as a creative being in the world?" And what then would you do with stewarding this legacy? So it's deeply personal, but it leaves us with a record by which we can understand our existence on this planet, our existence as humans who've created a cultural existence that really elaborates on the value of our lives.
Dan Klein:
So how do you bring this to life? I can imagine there's a cataloging phase in it, but then at some point when you've cataloged it all and you've got it all there, you've got to communicate what you've got. You've got to be able to express it to the wider world. So how does that narrative and storytelling work for you? I mean, you've got the oral tradition in there, you've got the visual tradition, you've got the written tradition, but I can imagine curating that and bringing that together, that's not straightforward.
LeRonn Brooks:
It's not straightforward.
Dan Klein:
We're so used to seeing data that we often forget the human stories behind it, the context, the people that generate these data points and the stories they tell. Frankly, getting insight beyond the data is something organizations have only relatively recently discovered the value in. Check out our interview with Heather Savory for more on that. This isn't just transferring photos from storage crates to silicon. It's about piecing together a story that has been hidden for decades, slowly unraveled issue by issue in Ebony and Jet magazines, and now being made available as a whole picture so that we can look back with the aid of snappy user interfaces and more importantly, the insights on our past that we have today and add context, narrative, and insights to the information. And with those insights, we can hopefully do better or at least be better informed in the future. So how did LeRonn get here, and what's his story?
LeRonn Brooks:
The long road to Getty? Oh, my God. Okay. Well, I grew up in New York. My parents migrated from Alabama in the late 1960s. My parents grew up in American segregation, and so you have images of Martin Luther King, you have images of the modern civil rights movement. And that movement was started to help American democracy live up to the promises of democracy, meaning all created equal. We are equal under the law, but the laws were actively working against my parents. And so they migrated to New York in the late 1960s. And so I had the benefit of being raised in New York during a really interesting time. And as far as the arts go, it was the flowering of the arts, I would say, in the 1990s when I was growing up in New York. And so I worked at the Metropolitan Museum, I had access to arts programs. I worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem. There were openings at MoMA.
And so there was a way in which, as a kid who grew up in New York, I didn't have to migrate to New York as an adult. I grew up in the arts as a child of that particular environment. When I teach about Leonardo DaVinci, I say that if Leonardo had been born in Siberia, he would've been Leonardo, the great goat herder.
Dan Klein:
Very good. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
LeRonn Brooks:
And it takes an environment, and it takes being at the center of a cultural-
Dan Klein:
A shift.
LeRonn Brooks:
Yes, that's right. And so Leonardo had the benefit of working in workshops. Leonardo had the benefit of seeing public sculpture. He had the benefit of access to the center of the art world, in that particular degree. And so it was in college when I found a book in the library by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson called The History of African-American Artists from 1792 to the present. I was an art student, but I had no idea about the deep history of African-American artists, people who looked like me. Sometimes you need a precedent. It really was inspirational to go back into American history and just read about all the people who had the same urge that I had, to give their dreams physical form, if you want to call visual art, that. But I also was a writer, and so instead of going to MFA program, I applied to a PhD program from undergraduate.
Then I was accepted to graduate school, and I got a chance to study with Robert Storr, who was then the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art. And so I moved from being a practitioner to being another kind of practitioner, to being an art historian. I chose the academic route. I was professor for a decade, but there was a moment where I said I needed a shift. I wanted to be in the field. And so I moved to California three years ago from New York and, Dan, I had a great couple six months, but then it's pandemic time, then it's lockdown time. And during this moment, I think for me, finding meaning in preserving people's legacy was really important, because it was a moment of extreme anxiety. It was a moment in which there was a lot of death. People were really struggling to just maintain sanity during that particular moment.
And so at the same time, to be working on the preservation or the legacy of African-American artists, was something that gained more traction, more meaning for me. And so moving forward, what I want to do is something in vein with this particular mission. And I think what I'm doing at Getty is really important because the institution like Getty is really unique in terms of, I work for a foundation that can do things that many other organizations cannot do. But ideally at the heart of my mission is the preservation of my people's memory. The heart of my mission as a curator, as an educator, as an academic, is to really help expose people to what is American history, and how can we not repeat the sort of sins of the past? Because even in this particular moment, we're not that far away from segregation. People think that is the times of Ancient Greece.
Segregation, it's still the 1960s, and so it's still right here. But I guess in our everyday lives, we think it's so far away because the film is in black and white, because the people are dressed differently, because you don't see the... Well, maybe we are seeing the outpouring of people in the streets calling a kind of segregation again, but it may be called gerrymandering polling districts. And so it's, the legacy of the things that led us into segregation still exist, the legacy of segregation as a legal legacy still exists. We think about the Prison Industrial Complex. If you think about the ways in which, the gerrymandering of the polls, voter suppression. For my own grandfather to vote, he would've had to take a poll test, "How many bubbles in the bar of soap?" "10,000?" "No, no, no, it's 10,001. You can't vote."
And so we're still in the living legacy of these things. And in one lifetime my parents have seen many different Americans. And so this position at the Getty was presented to me, and I figured this is a way to be a protagonist in the history of art. Meaning that this curatorial position meant that I would be doing things like acquiring archives, I would be just in the field negotiating to actually protect the legacy of African-American artists who I had studied as a child. And so it kind of came around 360 for me.
Dan Klein:
That's legacy and insight and action right there. LeRonn's story, growing up in New York and learning about the history of African-American people has allowed him to take that information and layer human expertise, experience, and knowledge on top. It's something that organizations are piling millions of dollars and huge amounts of R & D resource into. But it's something that we, humans, and in particular historians have been doing for decades or even centuries. And like a bad dataset, we are still feeling the effects of poor past decisions today. But with insight, we can understand what went wrong and how to fix it. I'm minded of the behavior of the city planner, Robert Moses, who helped shape New York as it's known today throughout a 40-year career in the early mid 20th century. There's a great book for Robert Caro, called The Power Broker, on this subject. Moses did many great things for New York. At the same time, he's considered by some to have institutionally segregated the city.
And for example, under his tenure, bridges and crossings were built between poor and wealthy neighborhoods. But they had low clearances. And you will recognize this with the metal struts that you see on the bridges off from Manhattan. They were accessible by a private car, but not public bus. And bus stops were moved away from certain cultural venues and populous sites. The result, the poorest New Yorkers, including hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, were effectively excluded from certain parts of the city, and Long Island, creating a cultural map of New York, which still influences the city today. Whether it was done by design or a mission is a topic of hot debate. But it just shows that data can be read in many, many different ways.
I'm loving the way you're taking, and I'm going to call them all these historic data points, but they're basically, they're all these audio records, visual records, written records, you're bringing them together, you're curating them into collections to enable us to inform where we've come from and to. And I'm really interested in how we use it going forward, not just with say, black America, but also more broadly into global politics now. So we've got histories coming out of all sorts of places, places of conflict, historically and current, and places of segregation, historic and current. And I'm interested how, and you use the word trauma, which I find very interesting. So I suppose this is the question really. How do we take these art forms from trauma and tell new stories?
LeRonn Brooks:
Well, persistence also necessitates joy. Persistence is understanding trauma, but also centering joy at the same time. Someone like Cornell West would call it, not the tragic comic, but there's a... Or maybe Langton Hughes, the bitter-sweetness of life. And so there's a way in which to educate one properly about the ways in which people have been oppressed or subjugated is telling a human story. To tell the African-American stories in this country, it's telling the balance between trauma and then persistence against that trauma. You have to include joy there. You have to include the ways in which African-Americans, despite the circumstances, had to utilize joy as a weapon, as a sort of boat through the river, to get to the other side.
And so coming from this experience, understanding my own familial history, I have to find a balance in which to say that we resisted by persisting, we resisted an archive as a record of persistence. And so if a person has a 60-year career, the fact that he, she, or they has maintained this physical legacy, is a mighty form of resistance. And so the fact that I'm working with artists to acquire their archives, means that those archives, the fact that they still persist or exist, is a coup against history.
Dan Klein:
Yeah. So you're allowing these archives to bring them to life in order to create history. So I've got to ask you then, 2022, you're at Getty. What next for you? What is the thing that you want to be saying? "Okay, 10 years time, this is where I've got to with what I'm trying to do with the archive." I don't know, really paint a vision for where you want to go to. I'm going to come back to this, your dream. There's something out there that I think you're seeking. I'm sensing you're seeking a dream. Where's your ultimate connection? If I was to wave a magic wand, what would you be like? "If I could make these four connections, this would be the dream ticket."
LeRonn Brooks:
Well, Dan, speaking in Jedi, I think I'm a padawan learner for life. Dan, I can't really say. But what I do know is that I do want to spend my life protecting and educating people on the value of African-American history. Through the lens of African-American history we can understand who we are as a democracy, who we are as a people, and we can understand how to move forward and not repeat the mistakes of the past. Because my parents are an archive. I'm an archive of New York, influenced by Alabama culture, but growing up in New York. You're an archive of experience because you bring many things together. And so for me, what I will say is that just from here into the future, I want to spend my life, I feel it's purposeful. I feel that living a purposeful life is to sort of think about legacy with empathy. To think about what I'm doing today, how it leaves a track record for at least a moral cardinal direction of how to move forward with empathy and think about legacy.
Dan Klein:
Wonderful, wonderful. LeRonn, thank you very much for today.
LeRonn Brooks:
Oh, it's been an honor. Thank you.
Dan Klein:
What LeRonn and the Getty Research Institute are doing is not being driven by commercial need or even time pressure. After all, the hard copy images, they're not going anywhere for potentially a century or more if properly stored and preserved. Instead, they're being driven by the need to tell a story. It's being driven by the need to piece together the information of the past, to create lessons and insights for future generations in a way that will last forever and open them up to as many people as possible to generate their own insights from. It's important that we're able to take these 4 million hidden cultural gems so that we can compare and contrast them to the popular narratives of their day and of today, and shine a greater light on them. Yes, it's an amazing collection of art and images, but they tell a story. And more importantly, by collating and distributing them, they can inform influence and inspire more stories in the future.
It's not just about learning from the mistakes of the past. It's about driving positive change. And that's the essence of good data management, with a very human face. Business ecosystems are not new. What is new is that they are becoming increasingly data empowered. To realize complex opportunities we need innovation beyond boundaries, democratized information and close collaboration between diverse players. Collaborative data, empowered borderless innovation is how we embrace a world of exponential change, and that's what this podcast is about.
Thanks for listening to Data Today, brought to you by Zühlke. I've been your host, Dan Klein. For more information on Zühlke's work, please visit our website.