So much content. Gobs of content. Never-ending ideas for more content. Content–how to produce, present, and connect it–it’s a challenge the SNCC Digital Gateway Project faces on a daily basis.

The SNCC Digital Gateway deals in two types of content.

First is the content written by the student Project Team under the direction of our SNCC Visiting Activist Scholar. This includes 600 – 700 word profiles of people, stories of events, audiovisual pieces exploring different perspectives in SNCC, and close-ups of the inner workings of SNCC as an organization. When the SNCC Digital Gateway debuts in December of 2016, it will feature over 150 profiles, 50 events, 9 audiovisual pieces, and 25 organizing SNCC pages.

The second type of content in the SNCC Digital Gateway is the primary sources embedded within the profiles, events, and organizing SNCC pages. Each piece of written content features 6 – 8 digitized primary sources. These are items like the arrest record of SNCC field secretary Willie Ricks — “Extremely radical, militant individual”–, articles from SNCC’s newsletter, The Student Voice, or SNCC activists recounting their organizing experiences in the 1988 We Shall Not Be Moved conference at Trinity College.

Multiply the amount of written content by the number of embedded sources, and that totals well over 1500 items. And that’s only for the 2016 debut…2017 is devoted to producing more content! By the time the SNCC Digital Gateway is complete, it’s aiming to feature 300 – 400 profiles, 100 plus events, 50 organizing SNCC pages, and over 20 audiovisual pieces.

Producing so much content is a challenge in and of itself, and our resources have limits. But the SNCC Digital Gateway also needs to present these vast volumes of content in a user-friendly, intuitive way. One Person, One Vote, the pilot site to SDG, taught us a good deal about what works and doesn’t work in site architecture. We wanted the SNCC Digital Gateway to be more accessible to students and teachers, movement veterans and the general public. That meant providing users ways to explore by people and place, periods, organizations, and ideas. The Editorial Board and project staff have spent months hammering out how best to do that. We ended up with something that looks like this:

In mid-January, we met with Kompleks Creative, the designers of the SNCC Digital Gateway, to see what they thought was possible. Here’s an illustrative recount of the conversation about profiles and how to navigate through them using geography:

SDG:“We want users to be able to sort through profiles by state, region, county, or city, and we’d really like them to be able to get to counties and cities directly.

Kompleks: “How many counties are you talking about?”

SDG: “Probably 100 or more.”

Kompleks: “Wow. That’s not going to work.”

Don’t worry. We came to up with a good solution. But the fact that the SNCC Digital Gateway needs to handle 500 – 600 pieces of content when finished (never mind the thousands of embedded sources) is an ongoing hurdle. The design process is only beginning, so our site architecture questions are far from sorted out. But in the end, the SNCC Digital Gateway needs to bring SNCC’s history to life in a way that both channels how movement activists understood their work and is accessible and compelling for a new generation of young people, teachers, and scholars.

Good thing we’re only half a year into a three-year project.

On the surface, writing a 500-word profile about a SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) field secretary or a Mississippi-beautician-turned-grassroots-organizer doesn’t seem like a formidable task. Five hundred words hardly takes ten minutes to type. But the One Person, One Vote project is aiming for more than short biographies; it’s trying to capture why each individual was important to the movement and show that using stories. So this is how we craft a profile in 7 steps:

Step 1: Choose a person

Back in June, the Editorial Board generated a list of people that the One Person, One Vote site needed to profile in order to understand SNCC’s voting rights activism. In less than an hour, we had a list of over a hundred names that included SNCC field secretaries, local people, movement elders, and everyone in between. And those were only the first names that came to mind! We narrowed that list down to 65 people, and that’s what the project team has been working from.

Step 2: Find out everything you can about the person

The first step in profile writing is research. We have a library of twenty books for instant referencing of secondary sources. Next comes surveying available primary sources. Our profiles include documents, photographs, audio clips, news stories, and other items created during the movement to make historical actors come to life. Some of our go-to places to find these sources include: Wisconsin Historical Society’s Freedom Summer Digital Collection, the Civil Rights History Project at the Library of Congress, the Joseph Sinsheimer interviews and SNCC 40th Anniversary Conference tapes at Duke University, the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive at the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Georgia’s Civil Rights Digital Library. There are more, of course, but that’s the start.

Step 3: Figure out why the person you’re profiling was important to the movement

The central question behind every profile the project team writes is: who was _______ to the movement? Once you start filling in the blank, the answers vary to an incredible degree. Movement elders like Ella Baker and Myles Horton contributed to the movement in different, yet equally important ways as  Mississippi-born field secretaries like Charles McLaurin, Sam Block, and Willie Peacock. Trying to figure out how and why is no small undertaking. This is where the guidance of our Visiting Activist Scholar helps focus the One Person, One Vote site on the themes that were at the heart of the movement: grassroots activism, community organizing, and individual empowerment.

Step 4: Use stories to express that in 500 words

Next, spend hours trying to express who the person you’re profiling was to the movement in only five hundred words. The profiles on the One Person, One Vote site aren’t mini academic biographies. Instead, we try to tell stories that illustrate who the people were and how their lives and work influenced SNCC’s voting rights activism in the 1960s. Finding the right story to highlight these central themes is key, and telling it well takes time and (lots of) revision.

Step 5: Workshop profile draft with project team

The first draft of every profile is workshopped with the One Person, One Vote project team (made up of 4 undergrads, 2 graduate students, and the project manager). As a group, we suggest how profiles can better convey their central theme, make sure that the person’s story is readable and compelling, line edit for clunky writing, and go through the primary sources.

Step 6: Send to Visiting Activist Scholar for editing

All of the revised profile drafts go the Visiting Activist Scholar for a final round of editing. Charlie Cobb, a journalist and former SNCC field secretary, is our first Visiting Activist Scholar. He helps bring the profiles to life in ways that only someone who was a part of the movement can. Charlie adds details about events, mannerisms of people, and behind-the-scene stories that never made it into history books. While the project team relies on available primary and secondary sources, the Visiting Activist Scholars adds something extra to the profiles on the One Person, One Vote site.

Step 7:  Voila!

Profiles goes through one last proofreading and polishing. Then come 2015, the will be posted on the One Person, One Vote site and the primary sources will be embedded and linked to from the Resources section of the profile pages. Voila!