April 4th, 2018. 
Kevin Hegg will deliver a presentation titled “Lynching In Virginia: Using Digital Tools To Tell Almost Forgotten Stories” at the Our (Digital) Humanity: Storytelling, Media Organizing and Social Justice Community Conference, which will take place at Lehigh University from April 20 to 22, 2018. Kevin will be part of the “Justice? (What Justice?) Voices and Stories” panel on Sunday morning. Follow the conference on Twitter (@MDHI_Lehigh) and Facebook.
The Digital Projects team, located within Carrier Library at JMU, partnered with Gianluca De Fazio, a Justice Studies professor, and his upper-level undergraduate students to create a website that tells the almost forgotten and neglected stories of 104 known lynching victims who were killed in Virginia between 1877 and 1927. The website is a WordPress site connected to a relational database using an inexpensive plugin and two custom shortcodes. Students in Gianluca’s advanced research course collected more than 500 related articles from historical Virginia newspapers using the Library of Congress Chronicling America database. Links to these articles are stored in the relational database and presented through the website. The website, which is a work in progress, also contains a map of lynching events and a clickable word cloud representing lynching counts by county.