ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants

We propose to plan a collaborative digital justice music-mapping project focused on the parai frame drum of the Dalits (former “outcastes”) of Tamil Nadu, India. This project addresses disparities in media platform access for musical expression by oppressed hereditary musicians, enabling better control over the understanding, documentation, and transmission of their knowledge. Diasporic appropriation of the parai drum by privileged-caste Tamils, excluding hereditary drummers in transmission, threatens a comprehensive understanding of the art, its diverse practices, and rightful attribution to its originators. Our map redresses these issues by sustaining the art’s diversity, supporting creative resilience, and contributing participatory knowledge creation to oppose global casteism.

We are a team of Indigenous (Amazonian Kichwa) Ecuadorian and U.S. scholars committed to supporting Indigenous peoples who wish to better govern data produced about them. We bring together two Amazonian Kichwa communities in Ecuador, Santo Domingo, where Valdivia and Grefa have a research relationship, and Venecia, where T. Swanson and E. Swanson have professional and family ties, to co-create digital products and prototype a digital website that represent Kichwa peoples from their standpoint. We use mapping and storytelling methods to train youth in digital data technologies to serve this purpose. Together, we explore how co-creating digital data about traditional ecological knowledge can foster intergenerational relationships for long-term Indigenous stewardship of riverine ecosystems.

Archive of Futures: Histories and Horizons in California teaches histofuturism and foresight to center Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color at Cal State University campuses. The project launches themed calls tied to hidden California histories, and students learn foresight methods in 75-minute workshops/classes and videos. Then, students submit speculative artifacts to a public, mapped counter-archive. Our inquiry pairs historical recovery with evidence-based speculation and liberation pedagogy, asking how past struggles, cultural production, and ancestral technologies inform preferred futures. Two exhibit cycles culminate in Omeka digital exhibits that visualize futures across the state. A companion site provides mini-lectures, lesson plans, and clear submission pathways.

This project proposes a bilingual digital archive of 21st-century transfeminism activist histories in Córdoba, Argentina. Trans organizers in Córdoba describe the precarity of their political work, how it is easily lost or taken without acknowledgment. Training activists in archival practices (including Mukurtu CMS) will build a sustainable infrastructure in which materials remain under the stewardship of the communities who produced them. A collaboration between U.S.-based feminist academics and a prominent Argentine trans-rights activist, this project models how digital humanities can function in solidarity with Global South movements: grounded in local histories, accountable to community-defined ethics, and guided by the principle that archiving can be a practice of collective care.

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.

This project uses digital community archiving and oral history to protect and share neglected histories of medical harm and political struggle among Black and Latine communities in New Haven, Connecticut. With ACLS support, the Community Histories Lab (CHL) and its partners will build the People’s Health Archive of New Haven—an online, open-source, and searchable archive that will digitize unexplored records and oral histories from the major activist organization of unhoused New Haveners and the two largest clinics serving communities of color in our city today. CHL will host and record educational workshops on how to use the Archive at the Public Library. This Archive will serve as a critical resource for memorializing legacies of health activism and demanding justice for historical harm.

For more than a century, Deaf clubs have served as vital “third places” for the American Deaf community, fostering community beyond home and work. Once thriving nationwide, these clubs are now rapidly disappearing and remain largely understudied, with no comprehensive digital or scholarly resource documenting their impact or mapping their evolution. This project addresses this by creating an accessible website that houses Deaf club research and lays the groundwork for a national mapping initiative. By exploring deeper causes of closures and the intersectional factors shaping access to clubs, this research preserves the legacy of Deaf clubs as essential sites of community and cultural exchange.

Cimarronas: A Black Women’s Archive of Ayiti-Quisqueya is a digital platform that narrates the histories of ten Black women across the Indigenous island of Ayiti, today’s Republic of Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Using digital mapping tools, post-custodial archiving, animations, biographical narrations, and site visits, the Cimarronas platform will be a trilingual resource to researchers in Caribbean Studies, Geography, and Gender Studies while remaining an accessible teaching platform for college-level educators. Beyond a transnational framework, Cimarronas moves scholars toward an understanding of the island's shared history, particularly in the 16th through 19th centuries.

This project addresses critical gaps in sexual health education for sexual and gender minority (SGM) teens by co-designing an inclusive, affirming AI tool using a custom large language model (LLM). Through participatory workshops and an iterative design process with a Youth Advisory Council of SGM teens, the project integrates their lived experiences to develop a dynamic resource tailored to their unique needs. The LLM is complemented by an AI literacy toolkit that equips teens with skills to engage critically with AI technologies, fostering empowerment and equity. This initiative not only tackles systemic biases in AI but also challenges the exclusionary structures of traditional education systems, advancing frameworks for responsible, community-centered AI development.

“Community Cartographies: Mapping Memory and Heritage in Lynwood Park” is a participatory digital humanities pilot that co-creates a community-governed spatial archive of one of Dekalb County’s gentrified historically Black neighborhoods. Using ArcGIS narrative mapping, CONTENTdm, and spatially anchored oral histories, the project documents the lived experiences of school integration, displacement, and cultural change while returning narrative authority to former Lynwood Park residents. It develops a model of spatial, community-led archival practice that integrates place-based storytelling and digital justice practices. It uses a replicable framework other displaced or historically marginalized communities can adopt to visualize change, preserve memory, and advocate for policy reform.

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.

This project is a collaborative effort between Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and Texas A&M Kingsville (TAMUK), two historically minority serving institutions in Texas. The project focuses on bringing light to black and brown Texans' history through exploring the rich manuscript collections, art work, pictures and historical artifacts housed at each institution's archive. Through exploring and telling the stories behind this rich material and non-material culture our team hopes to highlight this important history. Ultimately, selected items will be digitized and prepared for future use towards our efforts to develop a website.

Dream Palaces — centers Black cinema spaces across Africa and the diaspora as sites of cultural autonomy and community through mapping, public interventions, and virtual screenings. The project focuses on 1. the materiality and architecture of the “dream palaces” (indoor versus outdoor, brick and mortar vs. mobile vans etc.), 2. the cinematic experience itself (price of entry, ticket design, types of films projected, oral histories by attendees), and 3. the geographies outlined by the cinemas in terms of their localization in specific urban or rural environments, their networks of distribution and relations, and the type of spaces represented on screen.

This seed grant supports the creation of a prototype digital sonic archive of Black Durham. The project draws on sound and performance studies, public history, and digital humanities to interpret sound both as evidence and affect. lt uses Black orality and memory work to address the root shock and ongoing impact of urban renewal. Through oral history, group storytelling, and site-specific field recordings, youth and legacy residents will recover and document the history of displaced neighborhoods such as Brookstown and the Branch area of Hayti. Participants will work with project artists and scholars to create small-scale sonic vignettes that braid oral history with ambient sounds and speculative re-imaginings of the neighborhood’s future.

This project addresses the long-overlooked history of slavery in the Bronx by building a community-centered digital humanities platform that restores visibility to the lives of enslaved African-descended people. Grounded in Black digital humanities and ethical archival practice, it partners with Bronx residents, students, and educators as co-creators who guide interpretation and public storytelling. Through collaborative archival recovery, GIS mapping, and participatory digital design, the project counters historical erasure, centers descendant and local knowledge, and produces an open-access resource that reshapes how the Bronx’s past is documented, taught, and understood.

History with Grit: Recovering the Life of John E. Bruce and the Formation of Early Black Yonkers revives the legacy of Bruce, a trailblazing African American intellectual, journalist, and activist. Through archival research, digital storytelling, and media production, the project explores his contributions to Black history and Yonkers’ cultural heritage. In collaboration with academics, community partners, and WCC students, it produces a pilot documentary, educational resources, and digital assets. These efforts provide students with professional experience in media while fostering community pride and creating a “usable past” for Yonkers.

Homecoming Stories is a community-engaged digital humanities initiative that partners Western Michigan University with Detroit-based reentry organizations to document the leadership, experiences, and insights of formerly incarcerated citizens who have become community advocates. Through collaboratively produced oral histories, an open-access digital archive, and public educational materials, the project advances digital justice by supporting community stewardship of storytelling tools and expanding the visibility of reentry leaders. By combining digital humanities, participatory research, and ethical storytelling practice, Homecoming Stories strengthens community capacity, deepens public understanding of reentry, and models sustainable, equity-focused approaches to digital scholarship.

This project aims to reclaim mapping as a decolonial tool in promoting Indigenous traditions, knowledges, and land rights. Invoking the Indigenous adage - “ang lupa ay buhay” ("land is life"), our digital mapping project will collaborate with Indigenous partners in the Philippines who will “map back” to foreground their traditions and to support their ancestral land claims. We will develop a digital mapping dashboard that will consolidate indigenous narratives on land, locate them on map layers, strengthen local traditions, and promote community cohesion. Customizable maps will compare Indigenous land narratives with mainstream cartographic articulations of state territory, which may clarify Indigenous ancestral land claims and encourage critical conversations on Indigenous land rights.

At the core of this project is the desire to use open-source digital tools to visualize racial demographics and the geographies of slavery and freedom in the early United States. This project hopes to marshal tools for geographic information systems (GIS), digital storytelling, and JavaScript-based presentation that explore user manipulation of the data and visuals in concert with the arrangement of information by the research and design team. In addition to making public maps that illustrate the demographic realities of race and slavery in the US between 1790 and 1850, the project will also develop an initial site that arranges and maps additional data concerning some of the ways Black communities in the early United States exerted agency across the same geographies.

Our project aims to create a digital resource that would provide more information on the history of boarding schools in Hawai?i. The ultimate goal of the digital resource is helping Native Hawaiians learn and reckon with this history as part of larger efforts towards challenging colonialism, addressing intergenerational trauma, and restoring relationships with the land. The ?olelo no?eau (Hawaiian phrase for wise saying or proverb) that inspires the title of our project, is: “He lei poina ?ole ke keiki,” meaning, “a child is like a lei never forgotten.” We believe that reweaving the stories of these children, and making them truly “poina ?ole,” or not forgotten, is essential in crafting more just futures for children in Hawai?i today.

Our project aims to create a digital resource that would provide more information on the history of boarding schools in Hawaiʻi. The ultimate goal of the digital resource is helping Native Hawaiians learn and reckon with this history as part of larger efforts towards challenging colonialism, addressing intergenerational trauma, and restoring relationships with the land. The ʻōlelo noʻeau (Hawaiian phrase for wise saying or proverb) that inspires the title of our project, is: “He lei poina ʻole ke keiki,” meaning, “a child is like a lei never forgotten.” We believe that reweaving the stories of these children, and making them truly “poina ʻole,” or not forgotten, is essential in crafting more just futures for children in Hawaiʻi today.

The Queer and Trans Viet Oral History Project is an ongoing intergenerational multilingual oral history documentation digital media project organized and spearheaded by Viet Rainbow of Orange County (VROC). It is the first oral history project in the United States to center the multifaceted experiences of multigenerational LGBTQ+ Viet Americans. The primary purpose of this project is to expand VROC’s existing Oral History Project through three central means: (1) to develop an accessible, multilingual digital repository website to house VROC’s oral histories, (2) to build the VROC oral history team’s digital literacy and Vietnamese language capacity, and (3) to digitize thousands of historical photographs of LGBTQ Vietnamese diasporic experiences from the 1980s.

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.

“Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg” is a collaborative digital edition of the papers of Arturo Schomburg (1874-1938), the Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile who built two of the world’s most important collections on African diasporic history. Fisk University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—the two institutions where Schomburg was a curator—have partnered with a team of scholars, led by Laura Helton and Melanie Chambliss, to digitally unite Schomburg’s correspondence and create a portal for research and teaching. Currently in its planning phase, this project will launch in 2025—the Schomburg Center’s centennial—with a mini-edition, “Black Bibliophiles in Nashville and Harlem,” illuminating the intellectuals and librarians who founded the field of Black history.

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 project initiates university-based, transdisciplinary support for a community-run digital justice initiative in data literacy, data ethics and environmental awareness with the Eastern Queens Alliance, Inc. (EQA), a federation of civic associations in pollution-burdened Southeast Queens. In response to EQA's interest in art-science initiatives, it transforms data into sound to develop new ways of sharing air quality and aircraft noise data that EQA gathers, controls, manages and interprets. In workshops and listening sessions with community members, it sonifies extrapolated values to explore correlations between measurements for a community-grounded, public college-facilitated art-science effort to grow data literacy and foster environmental equity through liberation science and ecological art.

The UF AI Climate Justice Lab is launching a project to support individuals at risk of homelessness due to climate-related emergencies. This project, conducted in partnership with New America and Bright Community Trust, uses advanced AI to gather data, inform policy, and connect individuals facing housing instability with critical resources. By examining how AI and data-driven approaches can help prevent housing loss, this project addresses the intersections of climate change, homelessness, and equitable access to resources, with significant potential to inform and shape policy responses.

Public health is built on maps. But when it comes to diabetes in the Caribbean, many existing maps are alienating, incomplete, and full of errors. Yet remedying these misrecognitions is not simply a matter of more granular data either. Maps have long been instrumental tools for colonial and imperial power. This creates double binds in mapping the most basic facts of what is happening to people. We envision this project as a collective attempt at counter-mapping diabetes care from the Caribbean. With a focus on making visible the planetary and embodied legacies of sugar – and highlighting the ways women are already mapping their own care – we propose a platform for unorthodox map-making and community art that recognizes people not as public health “risks” or targets, but as knowledge-bearers offering insights from what they have learned by managing to hold up entire worlds.

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.

The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library is a collaborative, community-based model for gathering, archiving, and digitizing our “libraries” (Black grandmothers’ stories and cultural inheritances (e.g., material possessions, cultural traditions, rituals, language, etc.) across multiple, preservable websites that will be strategically and complementarily linked. This publicly accessible digital resource allows Black grandmothers to contribute to and control the stories we tell about their lives. It builds on the work of LaShawnDa Pittman and Trelani Michelle, who aim to repair what we are taught about understudied and misrepresented populations (e.g., Black grandmothers, the Gullah Geechee community) and to reclaim their narratives and culture using firsthand accounts.

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.

Co-PIs Dr. Ari Gass (Drexel University) and Dr. Teddy Pozo (Occidental College) are seeking funding to pilot a new digital publication, the Trans Games Digital Zine Project. This project brings together the work of transgender, nonbinary, genderfluid, and gender non-conforming game developers, scholars, and gamers. Taking inspiration from queer and trans independent zine making cultures, this web-based publication shares interdisciplinary scholarship and public humanities work on and about the ways that trans game designers and communities of play have always shaped and continue to fundamentally shape this thriving entertainment industry. Moreover, this project centers trans creators through co-design of the publication platform and facilitated peer review.