Our research and website on upstate New York secession are part of our coursework in the COPLACDigital course Divided Houses. This is a digital undergraduate course studying American secessionist and separatist movements, focusing on what makes a community and what happens when communities break apart.

As part of this class, we are completing a digital research project on the subject of upstate New York secession. In our project, we are tracking the upstate New York secession movement, from the founding of New York State to the present. We are hoping to provide a comprehensive, easily navigated website that would consolidate information about various upstate NY secessionist groups and their motivators.

One goal of our site is to consolidate information on one database, since there are currently many web pages, news articles, and social media pages dedicated to various upstate NY secession movements. However, our primary aim is to explain and analyze the goals and motivations of the many groups involved in the upstate New York secession movement. This includes both leadership analysis and regional analysis of the movement.

Our audience is primarily college students in this course, our professors, and future employers who might want an example our our technical skills. We will further make a consolidated effort to make our site accessible to other New Yorkers looking for research about upstate secession and activists hoping to find information and link up to groups using our page. Because of the diversity of New York State, we will ensure to use layman’s terms to describe political concepts and use simple interactive imagery, so it would be accessible to older generations of site visitors. It is our mission to also make the site very hyperlink heavy, to lead visitors to more information and primary sources, since this is a contemporary, and quickly evolving issue.