If there is one thing that I gathered from taking this digital humanities course, it is that technology and data, does not seek to benefit everyone. From machine learning and prediction models with racist biases ingrained into them to digital maps being effectively useless to lands that aren’t inhabited by the western white man, everyday use technology can be a prime example of the legacies of colonialism. The article “Dividing Lines” by Mayukh Sen looks into the Google Earth platform and the difference in how it is used in real life between the western world and the global south, as well as how the portrayal of the platform are inaccurate.

The story of Saroo Brierly getting split from his family on a train and ending up 900 miles away forcing him into an orphanage only to find his family many years later, is no doubt an amazing story. I could only imagine the feeling of knowing your family is somewhere out in the world but, having no contact with them or truly knowing where they are. His use of Google Maps and vague memories together ended up reuniting him and his family in the end. The author of the article said the movie depicted the reunion as a win for Brierley and more of a win for Google Maps. As if the entire movie was one big advertisement for platform. The movie left out key realities about using Google Maps in the Global South. Those realities are that Google Maps does not care about these places. From the authors experience and my own, finding our hometowns in the United States come with no visual hiccups. No outdated or grainy maps and basically accurate depictions of what we would see there on a daily basis. Although when the author looks for his mother’s hometown in India, that he can’t even write in English. There are different results and to make things worse, zooming in on some of the results are basically visually useless. These problems did not arise in the movie Lion instead, the only problem with Brierley had to overcome was his lack of memory from his past. I find this the most interesting part about the article because we see this in different context all the time. As westerners, we love to romanticize adversity and struggle and turn it into a story about overcoming it. Oftentimes, there is a white man savior complex being buried into the message and here, we see that complex on display in the form of Google Maps. Basically, we have the immigrant foreign brown kid being saved by an all-knowing western technology that is portrayed to have no issues and not a hint of the legacies of colonialism. Yet clearly, if you open the platform on your own and look around at some of these global south communities, your results may vary. For starters, in my opinion, I think we need to point this out more in Hollywood because the white savior complex runs rapid there. Also, we need to question companies such as Google about some of their decisions they make with their platforms. Why do you neglect the global south? Why do you use these places as testing grounds? When satellite images are clearly available,  why are some parts of your maps so outdated and in such poor quality? The legacies of colonialism will continue to prevail unless we demand those who benefit the most from colonization to level the playing field.

During this semester, we’ve understood data to mean numerical facts and statistics. Scholars can represent those descriptive numbers and aggregations along two dimensional coordinate systems and maps, communicating an understanding of the texts or medium under study by abstracted details into summaries. Contributions like Manovich’s Exploring One Million Manga Pages with Supercomputers and HIPerSpace “ use visualization and/or mathematical models to describe the space of possible and realized variations” by clustering the amount of gray scale or measuring the level of detail in illustration among 1,074,790 pages. Others employ methods like distant reading to process words and sentences in large corpora as way of confirm the coherency of writerly social characteristics, and ponder the examples which evade their models (see So and Roland’s stellar Race and Distant Reading). These flavors of analysis view data as a means push away from subjective knowledge of artistic output, proposing dimensions and measures as appropriate tools for grappling with humanities as scholarly sport. The quantization champions of digital humanities offer mostly rigorous and often legitimate intellectual insight to their subjects of study. Still, there is a more capacious views on data, a more digitally native observation, beyond the statistical definitions we’ve been exposed to this semester.

CUNY’s own Kevin L. Ferguson stands as starting point for many members of this minority group of data “analysts.” Looking at his frequently updated tumblelog Film Visualization, it’s easy to mistake his methods as art (in fact, he courted some controversy when an artist appeared to ape his methods). As a part of his scholarly work, Ferguson produces summed frame visualizations. Screenshots of a movie are superimposed on themselves by loading them into the open source medical imaging software ImageJ, provided by the NIH.

While comparisons on the corpus and categorical level are made by “automatic process which reveals otherwise unconscious information about film texts” (DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios) what differentiates these summed frame ouputs from more common visualization methods is two fold. Firstly, this method takes digital data, in the form of images, as material from which to create a subjective understanding of the objects under study. While there are numerical transformations involved in the production of these images, the artifacts generated require context and knowledge of the specific films under analysis, and are not summarized by statistics. Contrast, color and framing of subjects can be determined for each movie, or for the movies of a corpus, but the visualizations themselves are only a component in the over all conclusions one can draw. Secondly, these summed frames suggest a mode of experiencing or “reading” that is more embodied than typical distance reading. The scholar may see a perpondance of close-ups in a given corpus rather than talling the number of such shots, or may observe the lack of vue variation in a color film.

Another digital humanist with an expansive view of data and its expression is Kim Brillante Knight. Her project “Danger, Jane Roe!”, described here, cleverly grounds itself in a tradition of feminist praxis. Knight fashioned embrodery of reproductive anatomy undergirded by LilyPads, a flavor of Arduino microcontroller for wareable technology. Little LEDs light up in the decoration based on how many #prolife hashtags are posted on Twitter over a specified period of time. Knight links the projects to many linages of practice.

The adoption of decorative textiles, an artform fogged by traditional modes of feminitity, for a politically potent topic is one example. Leaving the application stitching visible by using a contrasting color with the reproductive organs “can make explicit the workings of a circuit” more visible by implication, implying “polarity, connectivity, and flow” that most digital hardware products obscure. A key aspect emphasized in the wearing this visualization on the body is to “remov[e] data visualization from the screen or page…relocates discourse around reproductive justice onto the site of legislative inscription—the body that may be affected by pregnancy.” If you read the article linked above, you’ll be treated to a thick fabric of theory and practice that legitimizes what could be glossed as an non-academic pursuit if you aren’t considerate or don’t read the whole article. As it relates to an expansive sense of data, we can appreciate an embodied experience of data that has it’s origin in technology on the screen, but seeks to escape it. Once can imagine a version of this wareable, perhaps untenable for long periods of usage, that vibrates when a word from a hashtag dictionary is posted. Imagine that as an embodied experience.

Writing about a large sense of what data can mean in a digital humanities project leaves to invigored by how many potential new modes and methods are left underexplored in a field. Digital humanities, in whatever manifestation or metaphor of organization, seems to experimentation and not wedded to received ideas of scholarship, which I find appealing.

            I’ve always found it amazing how retail stores can accurately predict to the hour of the day when a package you have ordered from them will arrive. With so much human activity Involved it blew my mind that it’s almost always spot on. Although for this to happen though, I knew there was so much exploitation in the works. Amazon drivers and workers working insane hours just to drop off your package on time is something that has sickened me for a long time but, “See No Evil” by Miriam Posner, opened my eyes to a deeper problem. This article dives into the tech infrastructure and also the human infrastructure of what makes up a supply chain. This article is a huge realization to me that there is a level of deception and exploitation that realistically nobody can comprehend.

For most companies, supply chain activities are sorted and managed through a software suite called SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products).  SAP is a massive software that companies can purchase to take care of all your supply chain needs and much more. Without the need to create and code software of their own, this cuts out a massive project that would take an absurd amount of time to do themselves. Products like these exist all over the business world, Salesforce and AWS for example do different things but, create a backbone to your business needs. Yet, companies are using these prewritten software’s without any real knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes. With SAP handling everything for you in this massive waterway of suppliers in your supply chain,  it becomes almost impossible to know where every product is coming from or how it’s being produced. Leonardo Bonanni put it like this, “If you’re a small apparel company, then you still might have 50,000 suppliers in your supply chain. You’ll have a personal relationship with about 200 to 500 agents or intermediaries. If you had to be in touch with everybody who made everything, you would either have a very small selection of products you could sell or an incredible margin that would give you the extra staff to do that.” Thus, making it nearly impossible with the current system to verify the working conditions of those creating the raw product or even verify that it is coming from where your company says it is coming from. To think that even companies are mostly in the dark when it comes to how workers are being treated while making their product at some point in the supply chain, is a scary thought and makes you wonder just how bad it can get.

So what can we do to fix this? Some ideas like putting it on the blockchain or using machine learning to stay clear of red flagged suppliers are some of the ideas the author talks about. In my personal opinion, blockchain tagging does seem to be the most reliable and ethical option. While I am a skeptic of blockchain and crypto with where it is at now, I do believe that one day we will head to a more online world and these will be the reliable way we operate as a society. With a Blockchain based supply chain, we would be able to tag and reliable tell where product is coming from and where it currently is in the process. With machine learning, I fear that rather than helping the problem, it will help businesses effectively make more money by only working with suppliers that do exploitation really well and can move product fast without hiccups from internal or external events. Rather than making working conditions better and verifiable, it could quickly lead to the complete opposite.

With supply chain methods and practices being so well established in today’s world, is it even possible to just start over or would that lead to total chaos?

I was very excited to participate in the Intro to Educational Game Design seminar on 10.28.21 as I was once an avid gamer. To date, one of the life moments I am most proud of is winning the NBA Street Vol. 2 tournament hosted at my college freshman year. I still brag about that to my college friends to this day. Yes, I am serious.

As the facilitator, Zachary Lloyd, mentioned, games provide “intrinsic rewards”… because they are meant to be a fun experience. When gaming, even losing sometimes can be fun if one feels they are progressing in some meaningful way, or there is a competition factor. I can vividly recall how bad I was first time I played NBA Street and how one of my friends said I was horrible, and he was right…at the time. However, games unlock a competitive desire. I started to play more not only because I thoroughly enjoyed the game, but also because bragging rights are social capital, and social capital is valuable in the right settings.

Zachary discussed the distinction between gamification and game-based learning in an educational setting. My understanding of the distinction between the two is that gamification embeds gaming into traditional pedagogical approaches, and game-based learning is teaching that is tailored around games that are specifically designed for educational purposes.

Zachary also highlighted 5 of James Gee’s (2013) principles of game-based learning:

1. Identity
2. Situated meanings
3. Well-ordered problems
4. Risk taking
5. Pleasantly frustrating

Of these, I consider risk-taking and pleasantly frustrating to be the most important principles used in games in an educational setting. Because the stakes are generally low in games, students can take risks that have minimal consequences which, in turn, encourages deeper and broader exploration. Also, it is ok to be frustrated by a game as long as the student is learning and funneling that frustration into advancement and productivity. Games are great in this sense because, by nature, they are somewhat detached from the seriousness that comes with typical curriculum but can still contribute to learning. Failure in a game likely doesn’t feel as bad to a student as failure in some variety of formal assessment. Moreover, the concept of gaming tends to imply one will receive multiple chances at success, whereas traditionally learning typically gives you one chance. In essence, something about calling an activity a game implies it is ok to be wrong. Additionally, both gamification and game-based learning can unlock a competitive desire that did not previously exist in the classroom—where individual performance can oftentimes be siloed, and students do not necessarily know where they stand with respect to their peers.

We wound up spending time experimenting with two games from the 1990s, Oregon Trail and Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon. This section of the presentation brought back memories of sitting in class in elementary school playing Oregon Trail for a full period (I suspect this was neither gamification nor game-based learning back then). Interestingly, by the time I reached middle school, I thought I hated role-playing games (RPGs), but I eventually grew to love them. In the educational setting, I cannot think of any game genre better for sparking intellectual curiosity and imagination.

            On Wednesday, November 17^th, I attended the Intro to GIS workshop that was hosted by GC Digital Initiatives. Through this workshop, they hoped to teach us three main things. The first being how spatial data is formatted, the second being how to look for spatial data, and the third how to use that spatial data to create a map.

            To start, they asked us to install QGIS if we have not already. QGIS is a mapping software that is great for creating static maps (maps that don’t move). While QGIS is just a software, the GIS in the name means Geographic Information Systems. They defined this as a framework to capture and analyze spatial and geographic data. In the real world, everything you see is all one layer- the roads, the mountains the buildings are all on the same layer but in the GIS world, every feature is a different layer. The waterways, the state lines, and elevation are all on their own layer and stacked on one another. These layers are created by spatial data. Spatial data has at least two dimensions, XY, and sometimes a third, which is Z. There are a few different forms of spatial data. Two very popular versions are vector and raster data. Vector data often represents points, tracks and roads, and land boundaries. Raster data is often used as classification data and changing values through space such as altitude, temperature, precipitation and population density. As the hands on part of the workshop, we were asked to load in the New York City zip codes. Once we did that, the next goal was to highlight the zip code you live in. For me, I live in the financial district so, the zip code I highlighted was 10005.

            As someone who is just getting into the GIS world but hasn’t done much with it since last spring semester, attending this workshop was a nice refresher and it made me want to go back and relearn some things. Such as map projections and understanding the many different ways spatial data is stored. These are very important concepts to comprehend if you want to truly grasp how GIS works.

For my final project, I would like to explore the possibility of proposing a collaboration – with the current DH project Moveable: Narratives of Recovery and Place (based out of Marshall University and West Virginia) to create additional features/layers for the current iteration of their story map and archive. Moveable, a live DH interactive mapping project that chronicles personal stories of addiction and recovery in Appalachia “and beyond,” is an incredible collection of text-based first-person accounts of recovery and addiction. As powerful as the project is, it seems to stop at Appalachia, and perhaps falls short in appealing to users who want to browse the material in more flexible ways to better understand the relationship between time, place, addiction and recovery. The project is live, and currently being updated, so I am interested in exploring how to make these stories even more accessible and fluid — How can we move beyond lengthy text-based storytelling in favor of a multimedia approach without diminishing the power and sensitive nature of the project’s stories and people? How can we continue to modernize a DH tool to appeal to users with increasingly shorter attention spans?

Home | Movable: Narratives of Recovery and Place

The Movable Project: a platform for people in Appalachia and beyond to share, highlight, and document stories of recovery.

Features to propose and consider:

• Timeline – to help map and chronicle the difficult journey of recovery in time – one that often looks more like a circle, starting, stopping and restarting
• Additional Map Layer – To toggle between traditional views like city/state/country to more personal data points like breaking points, rock bottoms, moments of hope, feelings of “home,” journeys made from “beginning” to “end” and in between

I would love feedback on whether or not one can propose a collaboration or addendum to a current DH project, and how to go about creating such a proposal without necessarily critiquing such a meaningful and nuanced digital archive. I’m leaning towards focusing on one feature over the other, but not sure whether that is a worthwhile addendum to a pre-existing project, or something that should be explored in a different project altogether. I love the idea of collaborating and building off stories already shared, but not sure about the ethical considerations of expanding work already collected and created by and for a particular tool. 

This past summer, I was awarded a fellowship that allowed me to dig into the archives of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. There, I was able to utilize their physical and digital collections to build a syllabus for an Introduction to Caribbean Studies course that is currently being taught at CUNY Graduate Center. I was surrounded by old, yellow-tinted newspapers, texts in foreign languages, children’s books, comics, zines, and paper clippings that seemed important to someone once. This experience got me thinking about the history of this specialized library/museum. Much has been written about the origin of The Schomburg. Its future is constantly being built. I was interested in that question of longevity and relevance in an ever-changing world as well as the ephemerality of artists’ and writers’ work. I was also interested in the stories that never get told; the stories that never reach you and I, and why; I was interested in the people and the stories that are not considered interesting or smart enough to be told. I was interested in knowledge and people made lost, invisible, insignificant and irrelevant to whatever it is their government and academic institutions are doing and we are doing here. I was and am interested in stories untold and how to better connect them to us as a means of finding likeness and meaning in the things deemed mundane.

Another point on my interest have to do with my journey creating this Intro to Caribbean Studies syllabus. The journey was not easy but I landed on an idea being proposed in several readings that I hope to also contribute to. In my Dominican Republic and Haiti week, I came across a text that advocated for the uplift and exposure to alternative narratives about both nations’ relations to each other that was not based on academics, politicians or sensationalism. It challenged readers in the diaspora to find people, texts, and narratives that do not contribute to the hate and antagonism that is popular about these nations’ relations to each other. The point was that there are stories that we are not hearing or listening to because we aren’t asking the right people or the right questions. My proposal hopes to do this by finding people and their art and writing that is not popular, known, published; archives founds on the street, by people who are local and native to those areas and whose lives as as interesting and relevant and complex as any other and who should be heard and considered when deciding what is worthy and what is not. This, I think, is what really gets me going. And potentially having institutional support and interest in this project can make this a reality. Luckily, the Schomburg has already expressed interest but wanted a detailed plan first. This is the beginnings of that plan…

I imagined that items just arrived or were constantly being sent over digitally and simply added to the Schomburg’s archives. Of course, nothing is that simple, especially in a world almost aggressively transitioning from the texts and physical to the digital and meta and abstract. I wonder what we are losing and who are we invisibilizing further through this transition. I imagine books and archives that would never get found or taken seriously. I fear that the historical inequality that comes with the lack of resources and access will end up not only burying deeper the knowledge, information, ideas, perspectives, hopes and wishes of many folks, but also depriving us of all the genius and complexities that can be found in “undiscovered” writings and archives.

I am interested in collecting and archiving texts from Black Caribbean and Latin American folks (the African descendant citizens of the Global South) writing about, well, anything. I will use this proposal to propose to the Schomburg the creation of a job there as traveler, collector, and digital contributor as well as communication liaison between un-published and un-popular writers and The Schomburg Center. To keep this project simple, for now, I will focus on one Caribbean nation, one town, one language (Spanish) and not dive too deep into politics of identity and the publishing industry and dynamics. My focus for now would be Black-identified, Spanish speaking people from Puerto Rico’s largely Afro-descendant neighborhood of Loíza.

I am interested in visiting this town and finding out its literary culture. I would locate the libraries, museums, book shops, etc to identify spaces of institutional literary culture that I do not want to focus on. I would be looking instead for spaces outside of institutions that foster a culture of writing and reading. I will not only look online in social media platforms, but also roam the streets in search of book fairs and writing materials.

I came to this idea in Bogota, Colombia. I was very intrigued at the culture of reading that seemed so normalized and popular there. After touring the cultural centers and art institutions in the downtown area, where I also ran into a book fair with popular and published books, I stumbled into a busy street that was populated with fruit stands, toys and art displayed on carpets and blankets on the ground, and tons of books mounted on tables and spread out on the street sidewalks. I also saw many people reading these books. Many of these books seemed to be self-made manuscripts, zines and local newspapers as well as recipe books and children’s drawings. There seemed to be this localized, unofficial and un-“discovered” nature to these texts. They were all physical and there was no digital archives anywhere. This sparked my idea to elevate these books, these writers, by helping to digitize them. My interest and experiences at The Schomburg helped me narrow down my focus to Black writers writing about Black folks, for Black folks and on Blackness in general.

I wanted to feel like a contributor to The Schomburg’s collections and help bring physical books and manuscripts to their library/museum. I also wanted to write short LibGuides (Library Guides) about each item found and publish on their website.Digitally, I would be interested in creating a website where I will do multiple things. I would want to map the locations of non-institutionally represented book fairs and writers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean using a platform and software similar to ArchiveGrid. I would populate the map with the location, found material, artist bio and writing/art and contact information. The platform will also have a LibGuide section that contains summaries of the texts and where to locate and purchase them.

Part of my portfolio to present to The Schomburg director would contain grants applied to, soon to apply to and any institutional support I have confirmed. Much of this portfolio will have to contain access to funds in order to be able to cover travel, room and board, compensating people for their time, purchasing books for collection and my living expenses. I would like to receive at least $2,000 from CUNY Graduate Center as part of my Capstone Project so that I can travel and collect these items. I will not only execute this project, but also write about my experiences navigating this interest. That will hopefully be enough to receive my Masters. Before graduating, I would have applied to multiple grants and reached out to other institutions that would be interested in helping fund this project. I have Latino and Black cultural centers, museums, academic institutions and intersectional centers that would be interested in collecting and archiving Black and Spanish language books from the Global South.

Eventually, I would want to write about my experiences navigating this project and issue that I anticipate will garner some interest. Issue concerning me now but will eventually have to have their own space and conversations are as follows: identity politics; what Blackness is and what Black isn’t; who gets to be Black and write the Black experience; Latino and Blackness, the legacy of Black people and culture in Latin America; Language access and limitations; representation and justice; publishing industry, race and class, etc.

For my text analysis project, my original thought was to analyze anthropological journals over time, focusing on language and the change in terminology in Indigenous and African American experiences in the United States. I decided against it because I would ideally like to compare the change over time, roughly every decade, and that would have been too much data to analyze for a project such as this. Instead, I began to think about what kind of corpus might be available that would be interesting to me for my interest in New York studies.

I decide to plug in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into Voyant. A popular poet from the mid 19^th century in New York, Whitman is known for being a humanist, a transcendentalist, open about sexuality, and opposed to slavery. I was curious to see the population of word usage in Leaves of Grass, to see if there was any correlation between his known persona and his poetic voice.

With a total of 39,923 words and minor edits to the stop list to add words such as “oh,” “ere,” “shall,” and “thou” a really interesting cirrus was created.

From this visual, there is evidence of the poetic nature of the corpus with words such as “earth,” “love,” “soul,” “death,” “hand,” and “sea.” Here is a breakdown of the top 75 words by word count:

Whitman’s choice of words shows that he focuses on the ‘human body’, ‘nature’, and ‘time’ the most in his poetry. Less common themes in Leaves of Grass are ‘place’ and ‘society’ or ‘politics’. That is not to say he doesn’t discuss politics or social functions, but probably uses nature as a metaphor for discussing what was going on during his lifetime. The present theme of ‘time’ is interesting because it shows how he must have been sensitive to death and dying.

When I saw that “man,” “great,” and “earth,” were the three most common words used, I thought it would be interesting to compare his works with a female poet from New York at approximately the same time as Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass.

I came across Julia Ward Howe, a poet I’m unfamiliar with, who is also from New York and released a book of poetry titled Passion-Flowers in 1854. I chose Howe because like Whitman, she also was an abolitionist, as well as an avid social activist and women suffragist. My expectations based off the title of her book of poetry and her background would be that “women/women” would be a top count word and that there would also be a common theme of nature present.

With a total of 22,932 words and after editing the stop words “such as ‘thine,” “like,” “thought,” “let,” “know,” and “gave,” the following cirrus was created.

Unlike my expectations, Howe’s top theme seemed to be ’emotions’ and the ‘human body’. Oddly, “rome” was the 6^th most present word, appearing 42 times. To find out why, I ticked off the first 6 terms so I can see when “rome” appeared in the text on the trends graphic.

This graphic shows that Rome appears quite frequently in the first half of the book. So I went back to the book and when I looked at the contents I noticed the titles of the section referenced Rome and Italy.

I dug a little deeper and came across a summary of Passion-Flowers that explains the use of ‘Rome’:

“Passion-Flowers is a book of forty-four poems, arranged to tell the story of a poet-pilgrim’s spiritual and aesthetic quest during a time in Rome. Julia had been thinking of herself as a pilgrim for many years. While the title of the book might allude to the flower symbolic of the passion of Jesus, it is also tauntingly ambiguous. The passion-flower is never specifically mentioned in the poems, although many other flowers are named, especially roses. The word passion appears in the book in romantic and sexual contexts.

Julia would claim that the book was about the revolutionary political events of 1848, plus slavery and religion. These are not, however, the themes that stand out and shock most readers. The first-person voice of the poems is that of a woman poet or artist confessing her ambition and her unhappiness.”

(https://erenow.net/biographies/the-civil-wars-of-julia-ward-howe-a-biography/7.php)

By looking at the top 75 words by word count from Howe’s book of poetry, it is made clear that an air of feminism and religion are at the heart of her storytelling, as justified by the summary above.

While I’m not a DH student, I think I’d really like to go with the proposal option and curate it as a DH grant/award proposal. What comes to my mind is the NYCDH Graduate Student Project Award which may not be available next semester (which is my last at the GC) for my thesis capstone, but is great practice for other potential grants or awards. I’d like to continue with a project that I used for my map praxis assignment, which is the development of a future non-profit titled Northern Slavery Collective.

About the Northern Slavery Collective (NorSC)

In February 2020, staff from various museums gathered at Philipsburg Manor, New York to discuss how they are rethinking their current narratives to create inclusivity by including stories of enslaved and free peoples who lived and worked on these properties.

This network of like-minded institutions has acted as a space to work through the challenges of the interpretation of inclusive narratives. In the summer of 2021, this group created the Northern Slavery Collective, which has currently manifested as a Facebook Group and Page for the cohort to collectively share ideas, events, questions, and challenges of this interpretation process.

The organization is in its early stages, which is hoping to expand publicly through a website and social media as a resource to the public and educational communities for understanding and learning about these forgotten stories. The public facing goal is to end the myth that slavery did not exist in the North or was mild in comparison to slavery in the South.

ABOUT section from Norsc Storymaps

My DH project for NorSC

With NorSC, I’m hoping to develop a cohesive mission that supports historical sites and institutions to share the knowledge of enslaved African experiences in the Northeast. The project will be a website that functions as a source for the general public, educators/academics, and the staff/employees of these sites. Each audience will utilize the website in a different way that has DH components throughout.

The General Public

To educate the general public, the website would feature sections including general history of slavery in the Northeast, history at each site, and virtual content, including exhibitions and videos. Each site can be explored using an interactive map that will give basic features, and can be clicked to open a new page with more details. The virtual content can also incorporate Omeka to feature exhibitions and collections.

Educators/Academics

For educators and academics, there will be open access workshops, resources, syllabi, and other materials and packets that can be used for educational purposes. Again, a map feature can be used here to feature educational materials that are provide by site. I haven’t fully thought out how all the downloadable material will be stored or accessed, but this could also have some sort of DH component. In addition, presentations can be accessed from the website (not downloaded), and things like Timeline JS can also be helpful in digital education.

Staff/Employees

Staff and employees of these sites can login and access a forum to share knowledge with one another. The forum can be used as a space to collaborate on projects, share events, ask for feedback, support each others work, and so much more. The main goal would be to provide as a space to easily communicate and network with one another on exploring, discussing, and learning ways to exhibit and educate an inclusive history. I have’t fully figured out what kind of DH component would work here, but am open to any feedback, as well as feedback for this project as a whole!