Institute for Student Learning Assessment

The Learning Tree: A Gordon Parks Digital Archive

The Learning Tree: A Gordon Parks Digital Archive is a collaborative Digital Humanities project designed to digitize and present materials related to Gordon Parks’s novel and film The Learning Tree. Parks’s autobiographical novel traces a young boy’s coming of age in Fort Scott, Kansas, and his own film adaptation of the novel was the first Hollywood film by a black director. Building on photographs, videos, and text documents held in Kansas State Special Collections as well as the Gordon Parks Museum in Fort Scott, the archive will constitute a multimedia website that connects the various media forms utilized by Parks with oral histories and contextual materials related to The Learning Tree. In collaboration with the Gordon Parks Museum at Fort Scott Community College, the Digital Humanities Center at Kansas State University has digitized hundreds of still photographs, hours of oral histories and interviews from mini-cassettes, as well as newspaper clippings, personal items, and souvenirs relating to Parks’s Fort Scott childhood and his triumphant return to his hometown to direct the motion picture, The Learning Tree, based on his novel of the same name. As part of the Diversity Research Forum, our poster presentation will showcase digitized materials from the archives at Kansas State and the Gordon Parks Museum that will form the basis of project website. Many of these materials have been digitized by undergraduate researchers at Kansas State, highlighting both faculty and undergraduate research on campus.