Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities

About

About the Project

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities is shaped by many questions. Since 2015, we have been working on a project in rural Virginia that celebrates the importance of education to the Black community in Harrisonburg, VA and surrounding counties. Like many projects of its kind, Celebrating Simms comprises countless collaborators and supporters, from local residents, local government officials, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students, teachers, professors, social studies coordinators, library professionals, archivists, designers, administrators, and local and regional granting agencies across the state. This project and those relationships represent a profound joy for us. They also bring a deep sense of responsibility, and sometimes even worry: How do we keep this all going? Will we get that grant we applied for? How can we compensate or at least properly acknowledge the many, many hours poured into the project by our colleagues, students, and community partners? How do we let people beyond our local community know about the importance, value, and even existence of this work? Is it different doing this kind of work in big cities? At other types of universities, institutions, or community organizations? 

How do projects elsewhere do it all? Where are they? What if we were better connected?

Of course, existing resources such as the Colored Convention Project’s Black Digital Humanities Projects and Resources Google Doc and the Reviews in Digital Humanities journal’s project registry have been tremendously useful resources in answering some of these questions. Since location is so important to our Celebrating Simms project, we were also inspired by work such as Alex Gil’s Around DH in 80 Days to wonder what might be revealed by mapping the locations of Black digital and public humanities projects. We were also excited by developments in mapping software such as Tableau, which could help not just locate projects geographically but also present detailed information about them and various ways for users to sort, view, and interact with their place markers. We embarked on this project with a sense of deep admiration and indebtedness to these and other existing projects that document and uplift the field.

Over the past year, we have asked James Madison University graduate students and our longtime Celebrating Simms collaborators at JMU Libraries to embark upon this data-gathering, mapping, and visualization adventure with us. Everything you see on this site is the result of hundreds of hours of their creativity and labor, and none of it would have been possible without them. Our collective goal is to make projects such as Celebrating Simms and many, many others more visible and better able to connect with, learn from, and support one another. We recognize that this is a huge undertaking. This initial beta version you see here is meant to be as much an invitation for others to participate in the ongoing development of this project to map the Black digital and public humanities as it is an early demonstration of what we hope this work can achieve.

 

Project Timeline

Fall 2022

Mollie Godfrey and Seán McCarthy argue for the value and need for the usefulness of mapping Black historical recovery projects in their article, Race, Space, and Celebrating Simms: Strategies for Black Feminist Biographical Recovery, published in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Iliana Cosme-Brooks, a graduate student in the School of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication partners with Mollie, Seán, and JMU Libraries Digital Projects’s specialists Kevin Hegg and Kirsten Mlodynia; together, they decide that the first phase of the project will be to research the more than 400 projects listed on the Colored Convention Project’s Black Digital Humanities Projects & Resources Google Doc along with additional projects listed in the Black DH Special Issues of Reviews in Digital Humanities; Iliana begins gathering and inputting data about those projects into an Airtable and experimenting with different visualizations in Tableau.

Winter 2022-2023

Iliana, Mollie, and Seán conduct research on the categories and terms used across a range of institutions, grant agencies, and journals in the field and begin consolidating and refining those terms by user testing them with project partners and other Digital Humanities experts at James Madison University; Iliana uses these refined categories to make a second pass over the data she has collected.  

Spring 2023

Mollie leads a class of fourteen English MA graduate students in a deep dive into the fields of Black Studies, Black Archives, and the Black Digital Humanities, with the students’ final project being to join the Mapping BDPH team and use the knowledge and skills acquired over the course of the semester to complete the first phase of the Mapping BDPH project. Together, they:

  • refine categories and data by conducting a third pass over projects to assess and refine categories and revise project data.
  • conduct outreach by corresponding with project creators to confirm their project information and their consent to be included on the map.
  • communicate with project creators and the rest of the Mapping BDPH team to adjust components of the project in response to feedback.
  • draft the website to share the goals and results of the first phase of the project with the world.

Summer 2023

The first phase of the project launches and Mollie secures funding from JMU Research & Scholarship to employ Iliana over the summer to vet new project submissions and updates, and keep the database and map accurate and up-to-date. 

Iliana begins reviewing a range of digital and public humanities resources for new projects that could be added to the map. For example, her initial review of projects listed in the National Humanities Alliance’s Humanities for All showcase has highlighted at least 200 relevant projects with which we have not yet connected. She will also begin researching and reaching out to projects listed in such incredible resources as Afro-Latinx Digital Connections (University Press of Florida, 2021), The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), the Network for Digital Humanities in Africa, and more.

Fall 2023

Iliana is accepted to present about the project at the 2023 Conference on Community Writing; Mollie is accepted to present about the project at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association.

Iliana starts a new position as Graduate Assistant in Digital Projects under Kevin Hegg and will continue working on the Mapping BDPH project in this capacity; Mollie and Seán also look for internal funding to hire interested students from the Spring 2023 graduate class to continue working on the project, and begin looking for external funding sources and project partners with additional expertise to help grow and sustain the project moving forward.  

 

Looking Forward

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities is a project in process, and we invite others to work with us to extend and improve it. Our current goals are to expand our:

  • partnerships and collaboration: expand the project team to include more scholars and practitioners of the Black digital and public humanities and more graduate students of color who are training in the field; also streamline communication processes to enable the timely inclusion of new projects and updates to existing projects. 
  • global coverage of digital and public humanities projects: improve project coverage to uplift Black humanities projects of all kinds—whether digital, physical, or mixed modality—and from all across the globe, with an emphasis on areas that are not well represented on our current map, such as Africa and South America.
  • minority leadership data: conduct outreach with project creators to gather data on minority leadership in Black digital and public humanities projects so that we can include this information on the map.
  • data visualizations: present an expanded range of data visualizations on such topics as funding, labor, or leadership patterns; regional, national, and global partnerships; and regional or topical connections, gaps, and opportunities.
  • website and database accessibility: review best practices in accessibility features and ensure that all aspects of the project website—including contrasting colors, alt images, fonts, forms, and screen readability—meet these criteria; also work with library partners to archive iterative versions of the database and make those versions downloadable to users.
  • funding: seek financial support to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.

 

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to JMU Libraries, the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication, the Department of English, and JMU Research & Scholarship for their support of this project.