Confident. Versatile. A Legend. These are words that have been used to describe Eartha Kitt, a woman whose voice and style inspired generations and whose heritage and personal narrative influenced millions. As the daughter of an African American Cherokee woman and a Caucasian man, Eartha Kitt’s personal history was laced with prejudices, but she overcame them with determination and became one of the world’s entertainment icons. Beyond her outwardly stunning appearance, Eartha Kitt was also a consummate survivor, forthright civil rights advocate, and talented musician and actress.
In 2008, Eartha Kitt performed publicly for the last time at The HistoryMakers’ event, “An Evening With Eartha Kitt,” at which time she was also interviewed as part of HistoryMakers oral history program, documenting the personal narratives of prominent African Americans. As part of The HistoryMakers’ complementary ongoing initiative to preserve and digitize the personal collections of their HistoryMakers, Eartha Kitt’s daughter, Kitt McDonald, donated her personal collection to serve as part of the organization’s groundbreaking and growing digital repository.
This initial pilot project of fourteen bound scrapbooks contains clippings and photographs documenting Eartha Kitt’s life both in and out of the spotlight. Scrapbooks, such as these, are considered extremely rare and by their very nature are challenging to capture and preserve, since they have a finite life as the ink fades and images, mementos, and paper degrades. By digitizing first and processing second, we are able to capture the images and clippings before deterioration or loss and to digitally preserve them for posterity. By using our DT PixelFlow Artificial Intelligence pipeline, we not only confirmed photographs taken of Eartha Kitt from the scrapbooks but also were able to readily identify the supporting characters in her life’s that helped define her personal journey, such as her daughter Kitt, who donated the collection that serves a visual representation of the artist’s life and rise to fame to The HistoryMakers organization.
Watch
The HistoryMakers
feature on
CBS 60 Minutes.
All Images Courtesy of The HistoryMakers
 |
 |
 |
Contact us at info@digitaltransitions for additional information on our digitization solutions and services.