About

Purpose

The purpose of this database is to provide a centralized space for literature for and about mixed-race people.

Background

Literature on mixed-race issues is of growing importance/interest across many social science and humanities disciplines but is often difficult to find and access due to language ambiguities, poor/inconsistent indexing, and the interdisciplinary nature of the topic.

Jasmin Lee was inspired to start this project after participating in the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) at the University of Michigan. While Jasmin participated in UROP, she was able to work on a literature database but only stayed on that project for the next year. The following year, Jasmin joined the Mixed-Race Project with Karen Downing and had the opportunity to work on multiple projects to raise awareness of mixed-race identity on the Umich campus. That is when Jasmin came up with the idea of a Mixed-Race Literature Database, a centralized place where people can find literature that features mixed-race characters and highlight mixed-race issues.

Process

This project was conducted as an independent study by Jasmin Lee (Class of 2023) at the University of Michigan through the American Culture Department and under the supervision of Education Librarian Karen Downing.

To start the database, Jasmin and Karen met with the Digital Humanities Scholars at the University Library to figure out how we would store the literature. After that meeting, we decided to use Zotero as the main site for the database. From there, Karen helped Jasmin create inclusion criteria and a dictionary of tags.

Throughout the 2022-23 academic year, Jasmin surfaced and gathered together conceptual, empirical, and creative literature about mixed-race people. She developed a literature search/discovery strategy in conjunction with social science, humanities, and digital scholarship librarians at the University Library, sequence the search and retrieval of the resources, browse the results, and choose approximately five to ten articles per week to read, analyze, and enter into the database. For each database entry, she included standard bibliographic information, whether the piece is empirically or conceptually based, what research methods were used (if empirical), the research question(s), any theoretical/conceptual frameworks used, sample type, and important findings.

The Mixed-Race Project

The Mixed-Race Project is a collaborative working group of University of Michigan librarians and Library student staff, who work with the student group Mixed@Michigan, and other campus stakeholders collaborating across campus to support mixed-race students, faculty, and staff.

Email: mixedraceproject@umich.edu

Current Stage of Database

Jasmin Lee has graduated from the University of Michigan and the database is now under the supervision of Karen Downing and the Mixed-Race Project.

Jasmin Lee

University of Michigan Class of 2023

Creator of the Mixed-Race Literature Database

TFA Hawai'i '23 corp member

Karen Downing

Education Librarian at the University of Michigan

Founder of the Mixed-Race Project

Acknowledgments

A portion of the literature was shared with me by Victoria Vezaldenos.
The inspiration for this project came from the UROP (Undergraduate Research Symposium) and Dr. Lydia Kelow-Bennett.
This project was created with the support of Karen Downing and the Mixed-Race Project at the University of Michigan.
Thank you to the multiple people who gave their thoughts and feedback on this project at the many research symposiums I participated in throughout the 2022-23 academic year.

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