Kendyl
“Underwriting Souls”
What it is: Funded by the Mellon Foundation of Johns Hopkins University, “Underwriting Souls” serves as a digital archive and platform to outline research by Alexandre White Ph.D., Pyar Seth, and Eliza Zimmerman. Digitized risk books, adverts, letters, objects, prints, records, and portraits can be found here, as well as nearly a dozen virtual exhibitions. Together, they tell the history of how insurance institutions in Europe, Africa, and the Americas upheld the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade—hence the website’s name “Underwriting Souls.”
Design strength: The tabs are all very clear. They correspond to what the user would assume they would, doing so in a very concise manner. The user’s experience is not over-complicated by unnecessary sub-tabs. For example, the “Risk Book” tab leads to a page with various links to and a search function for digitized risk books; the “Exhibitions” tab leads to linked sections of individual exhibitions, each including a title, description or time period, and image; the “Digitized Collection” tab leads to all other archived works, once again organized by each of the individual sub-types. All in all, this seems to uphold Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle quite well–you click a tab and, without any fuss, you are where you anticipate to be (n.p). “Underwriting Souls” seems to combine easily navigable website design standards with the practice of digital humanities, such as virtual exhibitions.
Design limitation: Within the “Digitized Collection” tab, there is an excessive amount of text that requires the user to do more deciphering than necessary. Here, Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle isn’t upheld (n.p.). For example, under the “Records” section, “Policy for the ship [name]” is repeated 13 times. The same words over and over become a bit of a blur and may even cause one’s eyes to strain, as mine did. A similar pattern with excessively repeated text is true for nearly all “Digitized Collection” sections. Perhaps this could be avoided by using one instance of the repeated text and adding bullets for each of the ship names, or by having a subsection titled “Ship policies” that a user can click to then see each of the ship’s names. Alternatively, an approach less like traditional website conventions could be taken to veer this information into the digital humanities tradition. Currently, there is a lot of unneeded text and a lot of opportunity to rework this information to allow for the viewer to digest it differently.
“Critical design can often be dark or deal with dark themes but not just for the sake of it. Dark, complex emotions are usually ignored in design; nearly every other area of culture accepts that people are complicated, contradictory, and even neurotic, but not design. We view people as obedient and predictable users and consumers. Darkness as an antidote to naive techno-utopianism can jolt people into action… It is more about the positive use of negativity, not negativity for its own sake but to draw attention to a scary possibility in the form of a cautionary tale.” (Duane and Ruby 38)
Quote’s relevance to text: I consider this quote within the context of the “Tracing the Forgotten Sites of Slavery in London” virtual exhibition, located under the “Exhibitions” tab. It seems that the just of this quote about dark themes would apply here, broadly; however, it is important to note that the quote is a reference and not directly describing the content in “Underwriting Souls.”
I pulled this virtual exhibition, which overlays a historical map of London with modern day London, to consider alongside this quote. The designers highlighted locations significant to the project’s focus on financial and insurance structures upholding slavery. Highlighting the past in direct parallel with the present may prompt the viewer to query how they may partake in the upholding of institutional racism and modern instances of enslavement. This relates to the text’s concept of “dark themes,” broadly, by prompting “complex emotions” in the user (Duane and Ruby 38). This instance of digital humanities within the exhibition provides the user with a chance for reflection, also touching on the themes of memory studies and temporality by reminding the user that slavery is still closely intertwined with the present.
Works Cited
Duane, Anthony and Fiona Ruby. “Chapter 3: Design as Critique.” Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, edited by Deborah Cantor-Adams, MIT Press Books, 2013, 38.
Krug, Steve. “Chapter 1. Don’t make me think!: Krug’s First Law of Usability.” Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, edited by Elisabeth Bayle, New Riders, 2014, n.p.
White, Alexandre, et al. Underwriting Souls, Johns Hopkins University, underwritingsouls.org/. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.
