ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants
“Sustaining Hereditary Knowledge of South Indian frame drummers through Digital Music-Mapping.”
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.
Principal Project Team:
Digitally Exploring the Black and Brown Experience in Texas
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.
Principal Project Team:
Mapping Black Freedom, Enslavement, and Activism in the Early Nineteenth Century
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.
Principal Project Team:
Na Lei Poina ‘Ole (Beloved Children Never Forgotten): Preparing a Digital Resource on the History of Child Institutionalization in Hawai’i
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.
Principal Project Team:
Queer and Trans Viet Oral History Project
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.
Principal Project Team:
Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg
“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.
Principal Project Team:
Sounding Data Justice for Environmental Liberation in Southeast Queens
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.
Principal Project Team:
SUGAR ATLAS: Counter-Mapping Diabetes from the Caribbean
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.
Principal Project Team:
The Black Grandmother Worldmaking Library
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.
Principal Project Team:
Trans Games Digital Zine Project
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.