ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants

With the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant, we will create an advisory board who will work with us over a period of thirteen months to help us plan an Institute for Empathic Immersive Narrative hosted at Virginia Tech. This board will be particularly needed as we set to design an institute that will bring together underrepresented humanities scholars across the U.S. to study and engage empathy with the latest immersive technologies available at Virginia Tech including VR, high-density loudspeaker arrays, intimate audio through bone conduction, immersive 3D video, and digital storytelling. Our critical interventions will be disseminated in a six episode podcast series, a white paper, and a public facing website.

Decriminalize Survival is a community-engaged, digital archive project designed to illuminate a submerged legacy of feminist resistance to interpersonal and carceral state violence. Through a variety of traditional and digital humanities methods, the archive provides a searchable database of past and present activist formations, an oral history project, and a gallery space for rotating exhibits. Decriminalize Survival argues for a rich tradition of antiracist feminist and queer activism against the carceral state as it brings together past and present efforts to decarcerate survivors of gender violence; resist gendered prison expansion; confront the reproductive violence of incarceration; and create transformative responses to rape and abuse.

Reco(r)ding CripTech documents the creative, interdisciplinary processes of six artists from the disability community in their art-and-technology residencies with the CripTech Incubator. The resulting archive will be fully accessible on the Ground Works online platform. Our working process emphasizes voice, agency, and aesthetic access, and is based on principles of disability justice. This project supports the artists’ in their evolving practices, captures the experience to inform future access-centered artmaking and archiving, and centers diverse ways of knowing and instantiating knowledge. We expect Reco(r)ding CripTech to contribute to a paradigm shift in our understanding of “research” by redefining who produces knowledge, how they do it, and how that knowledge is represented.

Using the ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant, we will plan for developing a large-scale digital humanities (DH) exhibition that illuminates the creation, history, and long-term consequences of land treaties in nineteenth-century eastern and southern Africa. Our plan pursues four objectives: Developing a prototype exhibition of digitized texts and objects plus critical materials, with sample results accessible to English-, Kiswahili-, and isiXhosa-speaking audiences; Writing a methodological reflection on project development and international collaboration; Strengthening the collaboration between the four stakeholders: and Drafting a grant application to support a large-scale digital humanities exhibition.

The Rochester Digital Annotation Project has two primary objectives: 1) to grapple with how digital annotation can enable community members and scholarly researchers to understand the racial and sexual histories in various audiovisual archives held in Rochester and 2) to explore how to generate accurate and inclusive data and metadata about these archives over which community members and scholarly researchers have shared authority. To these ends we will prototype five data dictionaries through the digital annotation of a selection of materials from the Portable Channel collection held by the Rochester-based Visual Studies Workshop: two centered in the knowledge and needs of Black and LGBTQ+ communities and three in the knowledge and needs of Black studies, queer studies, and media studies.

The Afterlife of the 1988 Chilean Plebiscite (Chile 88) is a bilingual digital humanities website that explores the national and international impact of the 1988 vote that led to Chile's return to democracy. An ACLS Digital Justice seed grant will be used to: (1) diversify the digital archive on Chile's democratization process and (2) create a bilingual technical infrastructure aimed at supporting the expansion of Latin American and Latinx digital humanities more broadly. The new digital humanities project will be directed to a Spanish and English-speaking international public interested in democratic transition, Latin American history, indigenous activism, and the role of the arts and humanities in political change.

Project Narrative - This project uses machine learning (ML) models to extract data from an archive of anti-apartheid solidarity letters predominantly written by Black South African women. This project intends to utilize newly developed optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR) methods to render images of handwritten letters into machine readable text. Once processed, we will then train custom ML models to produce triplets, meaning two or more nouns related via a verb that indicate a qualitative relationship between two categories of data. A knowledge base derived from entity triplets will permit us to better understand the lives, struggles and contributions of Black women in South Africa by collecting data on relations embedded in their own words.

When migrant and refugee communities resettle in the US, they are faced with major challenges of resettlement: housing, employment, education, healthcare, and cultural and technological adaptation. While these cultural complexities, linguistic diversity, and socio-economic factors affect their integration and wellbeing, technological advancement creates additional challenges and barriers in the way migrants consume, interact, and circulate information. Our research findings suggest that the refugee community struggles to get citizenship in the US. Hence, this project uses participatory action research and knowledge justice theory to develop a targeted website and mobile-based application to address the complexities of obtaining citizenship.