ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants

Chesapeake Heartland: An African American Humanities Project is a collaboration among Washington College, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a network of grassroots partners/subgrantees on the rural Eastern Shore of Maryland, as well as several archival institutions. We are developing a model of digital public history in which traditionally marginalized rural Black communities collect, share, and interpret their own histories in collaboration with academic historians/archivists. An interactive website shares thousands of family photos, home movies, oral histories, etc. along with material from institutional archives. We seek salary support and travel funds for two Community Historians, a Digital Archivist, and a new Digital Justice Public History Fellowship.

The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project seeks an ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant in the amount of $98,327 for an 18-month project titled, “Honoring Indigenous Community Knowledge: Expanding the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project Beyond the Government Archive.” To date, the Genoa Project has published nearly 3,000 government records, with work underway to publish several thousand additional documents. Building from this work, we request funding to begin a next major phase of our work, supporting descendant communities in telling more complete stories of Genoa through the development of a digital oral history and community knowledge program.

The University of Minnesota, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), and Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin) propose an 18-month collaboration to ready publication of 8,100+ items on the museums’ websites and open-source tool, Mexican American Art Since 1848, that progressively links US libraries, archives, and museums. We propose to 1) enhance and implement the Protocol for Partnering with Small-Budget Cultural Institutions; 2) test digitization workflows for various media; 3) develop cataloging practices to support dissemination of these museums’ knowledge; 4) with students, increase community engagement with the portal and scale-up overtime; and 5) enrich sustainability plans. Our work empowers Mexican American cultural institutions and artistic heritage.

This grant will extend the ability of the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI) project to find and present missing digital records of enslavement in eight northeastern states. NESRI ( http://nesri.us) now includes more than 64,000 records accessible to all through free online community-focused reports. Records were legally required to document many births, ownership transfers, and manumissions, and their maintenance is legally required today. Many records are missing from the public historical record because custodians may not understand their meaning or location. The grant would train, supervise and support at least 14 research partners to pursue these records and, thus, further the understanding of the extent and conditions that enslaved people endured throughout the region.

The Slave Societies Digital Archive holds the oldest and most extensive serial records for African and indigenous people and their descendants in the Atlantic World. This grant will fund development of machine learning to enhance access to centuries of under-utilized or understudied records for the history of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities stored in SSDA. SSDA will recruit and train minority students from Fisk University,Tennessee State University, and Middle Tennessee State University to work on SSDA's machine-learning initiative, transcribe historic documents and develop digital projects related to their research interests. Fellows will present their research projects at a concluding conference attended by leading figures in the field.

Leveraging the resources of the Oral History Lab @UPRM—and the experience of its interdisciplinary leadership team—the proposed project facilitates the development of community-led oral history for social justice projects from inception to dissemination: tailoring technology kits, digital archives, and multimodal outputs to the specific needs and assets of four community partner sites across the Puerto Rican archipelago. Moving centers of knowledge production from the academy to the community, this project develops post-custodial community archives that remain onsite for direct access by community members, while making stories of surviving stratified disasters (and the experiential knowledges they hold) widely available through mirror collections housed at the Lab.

The arqive is an LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer) digital storytelling map. It is an interactive repository of geographically and temporally located LGBTQ events and stories that presents narratives of LGBTQ history around the world, foregrounding principles of social justice, diversity, and inclusion through humanities perspectives. We are requesting support to build out the next phases of development: 1) continued technical development of the platform with additional UX/UI features such as gamification and AR; 2) content creation and research through collaborations with researchers, graduate assistants, and other institutions; and 3) outreach to community partners, sponsors, and the public to increase visibility and accessibility of this site and generate more user activity.