American Studies and Digital Archives. A Forum on Collaborative Knowledge Preservation, Accessibility, and Pedagogy
10.13125/americacritica/4522
Questo forum contiene interviste con studiosi e creatori di archivi digitali nell’ambito degli studi americani, concentrandosi su questioni all’intersezione tra teoria e pratica. Mettendo una moltitudine di progetti in conversazione tra loro, il forum ne esplora e confronta le capacità pedagogiche, le relazioni tra contenuto e infrastrutture informatiche e l'abilità degli archivi digitali di scrivere, o riscrivere, la storia “dal basso”.
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América Crítica
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American Studies and Digital Archives. A Forum on Collaborative Knowledge Preservation, Accessibility, and Pedagogy
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap
4
Dossier: An Epistemology of Doing. Digital Humanities and American Studies
2020-12-29
2020-12-29
2020-12-30
2020-12-30
143-155
1
Stefano Morello, ed.
2020/12/29
10.13125/americacritica/4522
143
The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States
2532-6724
2
open access
155
urn:nbn:it:unica-26476
American Studies and Digital Archives. A Forum on Collaborative Knowledge Preservation, Accessibility, and Pedagogy
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/cisap/article/download/4522/4620
4
                         América Crítica 4(2), 143–155, 2020, ISSN: 2532-6724, https://doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/4522




                 American Studies and Digital Archives.
            A Forum on Collaborative Knowledge Preservation,
                      Accessibility, and Pedagogy
                                                        Stefano Morello, editor1
                                                1   The Graduate Center, CUNY, United States

                                                              Received: 31/07/2020
                                                              Accepted: 17/12/2020




 Abstract—This forum features interviews with scholars and creators of digital archives in the field of American
Studies and investigates questions at the intersections of theory and practice. By creating a dialogue among diverse
projects, we seek to explore and compare their pedagogical affordances, the relationship between content and in-
formational architecture, and the ability for digital archives to write, or re-write, history “from below.” — digital
archives, digital pedagogy, American studies, digital humanities, open access.

 Abstract—Questo forum contiene interviste con studiosi e creatori di archivi digitali nell’ambito degli studi amer-
icani, concentrandosi su questioni all’intersezione tra teoria e pratica. Mettendo una moltitudine di progetti in con-
versazione tra loro, il forum ne esplora e confronta le capacità pedagogiche, le relazioni tra contenuto e infrastrutture
informatiche e l’abilità degli archivi digitali di scrivere, o riscrivere, la storia “dal basso”. — archivi digitali, peda-
gogia digitale, studi americani, digital humanities, open access.


                                                                           ing practice integral to knowledge production.
        hile the proliferation of digital archives we have                    Digital archives often (but not always) take the form
W         witnessed over the past decade has been contin-
gent upon the increasing employment of and experimen-
                                                                           of open access platforms developed to gather, preserve,
                                                                           and share historical documents. The very nature of
tation with digital tools in academic and institutional set-               open accessibility counters a rhetoric of retreat and the
tings, their emergence has also been inevitably informed                   construction of barriers among knowledge producers
by the epistemological shift produced by a new under-                      and consumers by refusing ownership over its content
standing of the archive across the humanities and so-                      and seeking collaborative and communal engagement in
cial sciences. Michel Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s                     both interpretational and curatorial work. Indeed, open
(mostly) conceptual reflections on the archive as an ac-                   access digital archives are often decentralized archives
tive historical site and as an active site of history-making               that provide modes for democratic access, exchange,
have prompted scholars to focus on the power struggles                     and co-construction of knowledge. As digital archives
and ideological underpinnings therein (Foucault 1970;                      are yet again changing our relationship with the con-
Derrida 1996). The so-called “archival turn” has shifted                   cept of the archive and shaping the work that we do
traditional understandings of the archive from a mere                      as researchers, an interdisciplinary effort has increas-
repository of objects and raw information to an ongo-                      ingly focused on theorizing the affordances offered by
                                                                           the digital form and the power structures and silences of
                                                                           the archive in colonial and capitalist knowledge regimes.
  Contact data: Stefano Morello, s.morello@me.com
144                                                                                        América Crítica 4(2): 143–155

For example, projects such as the “Early Caribbean Dig-          Assistant Professor, at the College of Education, Health
ital Archive,”1 “Colored Conventions”, and “Chicana              and Human Sciences (CoEHSS) of the University of
por mi Raza” have proposed different tactics—such as             Idaho. Our collective also include students, researchers,
remixing, reassembling, and decentralizing—to decol-             and veteranas/mujeres who contribute to the collection
onize the archive and violate the epistemic boundaries           in a variety of ways.
and the structure knowledge that it seeks to enforce.                Like so many of the feminist projects that are its
    I compiled a comprehensive but not exhaustive list of        inspiration (our analog foremothers?), the Chicana por
exemplary digital projects positioned within the realm of        mi Raza Digital Memory Collective had its origins in a
American Studies—Chicana por mi Raza, The Berke-                 late-night gripe session, in our case about how Chicanas
ley Revolution, the Chicory Revitalization Project, the          had been systematically excluded from both popular
September 11 Digital Archive, the CUNY Digital His-              and scholarly narratives about the 1970s. We felt we
tory Archive, and Colored Conventions—and inter-                 had to do something to bring attention to this history be-
viewed their creators or, more often, a member of their          cause the contributions of that generation were quickly
team of creators to explore questions at the intersec-           receding from public memory as a result of scholarly
tions of theory and practice. Through the conversations          neglect. We decided to create a digital repository of oral
in the forum that follows, I sought to explore not only          histories and personal archives instead of a more typical
digital archives as repositories of historical documents,        scholarly product (like a book, article, etc.) because we
but especially their pedagogical affordances, the rela-          wanted to share these materials with others (scholars,
tionship between content and informational architecture,         students, activists, artists) as quickly as possible so that
and, more broadly, the ways in which they seek to write,         they could create work that visibilized this history and
or re-write, history “from below.” I am grateful to the in-      help build a sense of collective responsibility for its
terviewees for taking the time to answer our questions at        preservation.
a particularly sensitive time, when the COVID-19 pan-
demic, distant learning, and further budget cuts have, yet          How do the technologies you used complicate tra-
again, uprooted our lives and higher education.                  ditional understandings of “the archive” and the
                                                                 knowledge structure it seeks to enforce?
R EFERENCES
                                                                 The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.    uses digital tools to expand the nature and scope of the
      Chicago: Chicago UP.
                                                                 traditional archive, and reimagine it as a site of knowl-
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of   edge exchange that is open to collective interpretation
     the Human Sciences. London: Routledge.
                                                                 and analysis from as broad an interpretive community as
                                                                 possible, not just accredited scholars, but also students,
                                                                 community members, and even the women whose
Chicana por mi Raza | http://chicanapormiraza.org                stories it contains. In other words, our project pushes
                                                                 back on the idea of an archive as a static repository to be
   Responses by Maria Cotera (Associate Professor                mined for scholarly projects, and reimagines the archive
of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the                  as an active and living site of intergenerational knowl-
University of Texas, Austin) with contributions from             edge exchange. We also see the archive as a collective
Linda Garcia Merchant.                                           memory project (hence the name Chicana por mi Raza
                                                                 Digital Memory Collective). This vision is inspired by
   What is Chicana por mi Raza?                                  the collective and collaborative Chicana praxis that we
The Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective is             preserve and engage in this recovery project. Guided
composed of Maria Cotera, Associate Professor of Mex-            by Chicana praxis, the Chicana por mi Raza Digital
ican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of          Memory Collective deploys digital infrastructure to
Texas, Austin; Linda García Merchant, Post-Doctoral              reformat knowledge relations inside and outside the
Fellow in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary              academy and build a transgenerational Chicana “un-
Heritage Program, Arte Público Press at the University           dercommons.” In this sense, it is simultaneously an
of Houston; and Marco Seiferle Valencia, Technical Di-           archival development project (with the goal of building
rector and Digital Archivist Open Education Librarian            a Library of Alexandria of Chicana praxis) and a col-
1   See Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s article in this issue.        laborative and process-oriented effort to move beyond
Stefano Morello, ed., American Studies and Digital Archives                                                         145

the individualist ethos that has colonized the academic       teach courses linked to the project. By providing these
space of gender studies and ethnic studies, fields that       substantial teaching resources to instructors who might
over the years have shed their more emancipatory and          otherwise be wary of developing a logistically compli-
nonhierarchical impulses in favor of a “disciplined”          cated oral history and archive collection class, we hope
mode of scholarly production (by scholars for scholars)       to encourage and support others to create high-quality
that has effectively narrowed the audience to which (and      local history projects that will contribute materials to
often for which) our work speaks. While our project           our repository without having to reinvent the wheel.
gestures toward what might be considered one of the           In effect, this pedagogical model “crowdsources” our
classic genres of institutional knowledge making (the         archive and oral history collection process—reaching
archive), it is an interruption of business as usual in       areas that our research team may not be able to access
the academy; a refusal to accommodate to professional         given our limited resources—but it does so under
norms that would have us produce scholarship in ways          reasonably controlled circumstances.
that transform subjugated and subaltern knowledges
into commodities (books, films, articles) that can be             What were the most challenging aspects of the de-
circulated, exchanged, and celebrated, resulting in           velopment of the project/its curatorial work?
prizes, better jobs, invited lectures, and everything that    By far, the most challenging aspect of the project is
counts for prestige in the academy.                           its precarity as an “unauthorized” knowledge forma-
                                                              tion. Like the many knowledge-making projects of
    What is the pedagogical value of the archive?             our foremothers, the Chicana por mi Raza Digital
While our public facing website is used by many               Memory Collective exists because we have willed it
teachers to supplement student learning about the Civil       to. We have sought out national funding sources to no
Rights era in the US, we see the project as, first and        success, though the project has been awarded smaller
foremost, a model for engaged learning and transgener-        grants within the University of Michigan, and is now
ational pedagogical praxis. Indeed, much of the work          supported by the digital infrastructure of the University
of the project has been elaborated through pedagogical        of Texas-Austin. Over the life of the project, it has led
efforts, either in classrooms or by our undergraduate         a migratory existence, moving from one institutional
research assistants. For example, Maria Cotera and            server to another. Our access to cutting-edge digital
Marco Seiferle Valencia developed an oral history             tools is largely a result of the beneficence of interested
class linked to the project in which teams of student         developers and individuals in institutions (like James
researchers are tasked with completing the full process       Myers of SEAD, Kevin Hamilton of UIUC’s Institute
of collecting, organizing, and interpreting materials         for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences,
for the archive. They undertake this process from             and Sharon Broude Geva, director of Advanced Re-
start to finish, assisting with oral histories, scanning      search Computing at the University of Michigan) who
documents, cataloguing materials collected, uploading         have seen something worthwhile in our efforts. We have
them to our repository, and writing biographies and           relied on the knowledge, patience, and commitment of
essays based on their research for our website. To            the project’s serially underpaid digital archivist, Marco
do this work, students must learn about the historical        Seiferle Valencia, who has been with Chicana por mi
context of the materials they are collecting as well as       Raza since 2013, and has had to suffer through his own
oral history methodologies and the fundamentals of            conditions of precarity, relying on small institutional
archival theory and practice. They must also acquire          grants for his next paycheck until he was able to get
a dizzying array of technological skills, from basic to       a “real” job (a development that, however necessary,
complex. They learn how to digitally record oral history      inevitably deprived the project of a full-time digital
interviews and scan materials to archival standards, they     archivist). The grunt work of building the collection has
work with spreadsheets to keep track of metadata, and         been completed by committed students and contingent
they learn basic Drupal skills so that they can create        faculty who do work for the project through courses,
essays and biographies for our public website. This           independent studies, and unpaid research internships.
skill building is facilitated by pedagogical materials that   For years (before she became a doctoral student at the
we have developed for the project, from reading lists         University of Nebraska), Linda worked on the project
to guidelines, workflows, and spreadsheet templates,          as an unpaid collaborator, using her vacation time and
all of which are made available to others who wish to         accumulated sick leave to go on oral history trips and to
146                                                                                    América Crítica 4(2): 143–155

edit film footage for hours on end. While Maria Cotera        interview, who have offered their insights and archives
has shaped her teaching and research agenda to support        to previous projects, are profoundly mistrustful of
the project, this work is not recognized when it comes        scholars bearing gifts. They frequently express feeling
to promotion. Despite the fact that dozens of scholars,       “used” and still left out of the historical record. Our
teachers, and students have used the materials we have        commitment to creating a repository as opposed to yet
collected in their research, teaching, and public history     another book, essay, or documentary film is a response
projects, what matters in the American academy is the         to this unequal knowledge relationship, as much as it is
book—the neat, tidy, and of course, comprehensive,            a practical effort to spur more scholarship and teaching
narrative that will tell us what Chicana feminism was         and thereby address the urgent need to document and
in the 1970s and “correct” the historiographical record.      preserve this history before it passes into obscurity. So
But we have learned too much from the archive to              for us, leaving materials in place is as much a political
reduce it to this, and the book is a luxury when the          decision as it is a pragmatic approach to our physical
stories are disappearing.                                     limitations (we are not a “brick and mortar” library).
                                                              That said, the objects in our collection represent
    What is the relationship between the team of cre-         something more than simply a mediated form of the
ators of the project and its holdings?                        objects we scan—they are, instead, the digital residue
The project’s founders, Maria Cotera and Linda Garcia         of the scenes of transgenerational memory exchange
Merchant, both identify as “daughters of the revolution.”     that are the beating heart of our project. Even more
Our mothers, Martha Cotera and Ruth “Rhea” Mojica             ephemeral than tiffs, jpegs, and movie files, these scenes
Hammer (who have also been subjects of our oral               of archival “encuentro” where memory is shared, passed
history and archive collection), were both self-identified    on, confirmed, and recalibrated are what is really being
Chicana feminists. They dragged us to countless               archived in our project. At the same time, the objects
conferences, marches, and meetings. We grew up in the         we collect are also “evidence” of a rich history that we
political ferment of the 1970s, and thus have a particular    want to bring to light (in some cases they are the ONLY
“insider’s view” of its gendered contradictions as            evidence of this history) which is generally ignored by
witnesses to our mother’s efforts to articulate a mode        scholars and not preserved in libraries, and we want
of politics at the intersection of multiple oppressions.      to share that with as broad a population as possible.
In many ways, their approach to knowledge produc-             We understand that not everyone can, or wants to,
tion and collective struggle have inspired our approach       access this history through digital modalities. For this
to the project as a collective and transgenerational space.   reason, we have found ways to use the materials in our
                                                              digital collection to reach spaces outside the institution
    How does the archive deal with the lack of mate-          and people who may not have access to our website
riality of the digital?                                       and repository, enacting a key transfer of knowledge
From the start, Chicana por mi Raza has been en-              from digital to analog environments. We have curated
visioned as a post-custodial collection project. We           public history projects from pop-up exhibits to major
record our oral histories in women’s homes (or the            community exhibitions, including two major exhibits in
location of their choosing) and digitize their archives       Detroit in partnership with the University of Michigan
in situ. We very rarely take personal items out of            Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. We see this
their natural habitat. Largely this is a response to a        movement from analog to digital and back to analog
profound sense of betrayal that many of the women             as a critical transit of memory that allows us to not
we interview feel as a result of their past interaction       only bring the urgent materiality of the archive back
with scholars who have taken their materials and never        to “life” in the community, but also an opportunity to
returned them, or who have recorded their stories and         spur memory and expand knowledge about Chicanas in
left them to languish in institutional archives that the      the 1970s while forging new communities of struggle
community (and the women) do not have access to. It           inside and outside the university.
goes without saying that the products of these unequal
exchanges—academic books and articles—have largely               How does your intended audience inform the
benefited the scholarly community, but only rarely            archive’s web infrastructure and its design choices?
reach the women whose knowledge is the basis for              Because our intended audience is not just scholars, but a
this scholarly work. As a result, the women whom we           broader transgenerational collective, we have tended to
Stefano Morello, ed., American Studies and Digital Archives                                                                  147

favor relatively easy to use digital tools that even digital   ganized processes and fine tuned methods of collabora-
novices can use to access and build our repository. The        tion and production. We work well with one another,
materials we collect are stored in a digital repository        and with our collaborators—a model that extends to our
built on a data management system called Clowder,              ancillary collecting projects and community collabora-
which enables users in multiple locations to upload            tions. Building community means building networks of
and download multimedia files via a login. We chose            participants that includes both subjects and practition-
the Clowder platform (which was originally developed           ers in a multi-disciplinary approach to the production of
for collecting environmental data and other natural            knowledge—archivists, writers, media specialists, and
science applications) over Omeka or Drupal, because it         technologists working with scholars, faculty and com-
is very simple to use (even for digital novices), and it       munity members. The archive is not just a collection of
allows for the storage, organization, and quick retrieval      artifacts or data, it is the transformational moments of
of very large files. Because our Clowder platform              witness that each collaborator experiences within their
has a very low bar in terms of technical expertise,            own interactions with artifacts, data, and each other. The
we are able to train partner projects and students in a        archive thus becomes a group responsibility for all par-
relatively short period of time (an afternoon workshop)        ticipants—it creates in each person, a sense of cultural
and provide them with simple guidelines, workflows,            obligation to record, document, curate and ultimately
and spreadsheet templates to facilitate their work. The        give new and unique voice to material from moments
repository currently includes over one hundred and             that individually resonate. The archive is a living, ac-
fifty oral histories collected by our project team as          tive space, where knowledge is produced in constant di-
well as several regional partner projects like Somos           alogue between the generation that we are documenting
Latinas in Wisconsin (Dr. Andrea “Tess” Arenas,                and the generations who are given the responsibility to
University of Wisconsin–Madison), Chicana Chicago              preserve memory and history and to sustain and grow
(Dr. Elena Gutierrez, University of Illinois–Chicago),         our collective memory. The archive is us.
and the Enriqueta Vasquez Digital History Project (Dr.
Theresa Cordova, University of New Mexico). Because            R EFERENCES
access to our digital repository is login-protected, we        Cotera, Maria. 2015. “‘Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster’: Fem-
have also created a public website (using Drupal) that               inist Archival Praxis after the Digital Turn.” The South At-
includes selected biographies of the women we have                   lantic Quarterly 114(4): 781-802. https://doi.org/10.1215/
                                                                     00382876-3157133.
interviewed (along with images from their archive and
occasionally videoclips of their interviews), visualiza-       Cotera, Maria. 2018. “Nuestra Autohistoria: Toward a Chicana
tions like maps and timelines, and brief essays. Again,              Digital Praxis.” American Quarterly 70(3): 483-504. https:
most of the material on our public website has been                  //doi.org/10.1353/AQ.2018.0032.
created by students who have little to no technical
knowledge, but who have developed a substantial
amount of historical knowledge as a result of their close      The Berkeley Revolution | http://revolution.berkeley.edu
work with the archive. Tools like Clowder and Drupal
have enabled us to collaborate with scholars, teach-              Responses by Scott Saul, Professor of English
ers, students and community members to expand the              and American Studies at the University of California,
repository regardless of their level of technical expertise.   Berkeley.

   How is the archive sustained in the long term?                  What is the The Berkeley Revolution?
Our understanding of “sustainability” has been shaped          “The Berkeley Revolution: A Digital Archive of the
by over a decade of work building the project without          East Bay’s Transformation in the Late-1960s and 1970s”
the support of major grants or institutional commitment.       has been built by three teams of students, through an
Our precarious existence has required lots of additional       advanced American Studies research seminar that ran in
labor, but also smart and innovative approaches to col-        2017, 2018, and 2020. I was motivated to create the site
laborative methods of production. As we have never had         after the success of my “Richard Pryor’s Peoria” site,
the luxury of working in the same physical spaces ex-          which was a digital companion to Becoming Richard
cept on research trips, our workflows presume a virtual        Pryor, my biography of the trailblazing comedian.
working space and strategies geared toward acutely or-         In that case, I’d wanted to dramatize the archive I’d
148                                                                                    América Crítica 4(2): 143–155

assembled in the course of doing my research for             a purpose” (161)—a collection that, however capacious,
the first sections of the book (on Pryor’s first twenty      is always partial and incomplete.
years in Peoria, IL, a midwestern city that had been             Many of the project archives have tapped, for
understudied relative to its importance), and so I pulled    written materials and photos, the personal collections
together a team that built a site to curate that research.   of people involved in the history they described. For
Building the site was a wonderfully fulfilling experience    instance, the project on Berkeley’s Rainbow Sign drew
of collaboration for me—like none other that I’d had in      significantly on the boxes of materials collected by
my twenty years in the humanities—and I wondered if          the founder of that black cultural center, which were
I could re-create the thrill and deep learning of it in my   sitting unopened in the basement of her daughter. In
undergraduate teaching at UC Berkeley. There would           addition, the students have often engaged in lengthy
be a key difference, though: while I’d already wrapped       interviews with those involved in the history they seek
up my research on Pryor and Peoria before building that      to reconstruct, which then inform their curation of the
first site, the “Berkeley Revolution” would be driven by     archive. The resulting assemblage offers a healthy mix
the research that my students would perform over the         of materials: primary sources from personal collections
course of the semester. We would be building the site        (diaries, photos, leaflets, calendars, etc.) put in dialogue
and do the research to fill out the site at the same time.   with articles from the alternative press, the mainstream
    What drove the creation of this site, in particular,     press, and sometimes the conservative press; with oral
were two things. First, I sensed that the history of         histories; and with materials from institutional archives.
Berkeley in the 1970s—not the Berkeley of the Free               These materials (consisting of 20-50 documents a
Speech Movement and People’s Park—had been little            piece, each with an annotation) are then curated through
told, yet was so important for the history of American       a fairly strict format: they are divided into different
social movements such as the ecology movement, the           arrays of 3-9 items; each array is given a title; and
gay liberation movement, the disability rights move-         each item is given a short “tagline” so that one can
ment, the women’s liberation movement, and others.           glance at an array and, by looking at the thumbnails of
Second, I knew that there were many institutional            each document and the tagline assigned to it, make an
archival holdings that hadn’t been tapped, and many          informed choice about which document to explore.
people—veteranos of these movements—who hadn’t                   Hopefully, we’ve achieved some balance in how
been tapped as sources (and who weren’t going to live        we’ve created these non-institutional archives. On the
forever).                                                    one hand, we aim to cast a wide net, in terms of sources,
    The audience was imagined to be a large public one:      so that we can allow many different voices from the
anyone with an interest in the history of Berkeley and       time to speak. On the other hand, I think we do more
the larger Bay Area, or the history of the “long 1960s,”     than many digital projects to orchestrate those voices
or the history of postwar America more generally.            so that, rather than overwhelm the visitor, they seduce
We emphasized storytelling and the artful curation of        the visitor to follow them deeper into the archive we’ve
documents, using the model of the museum curator             built.
who wants to spark interest and engagement; we didn’t
want to prescribe a narrow way of understanding our             What is the pedagogical value of the archive?
materials.                                                   The archive’s first pedagogical value has been to the
                                                             students who have created it—and in so doing, have
   How do the technologies you used complicate tra-          learned how to annotate primary sources, assemble an
ditional understandings of “the archive” and the             archive, and weave a complex story that is true to the
knowledge structure it seeks to enforce?                     complications of their materials.
Each project on the site involves assembling a magpie’s         As to how the project has been used: it has been
archive of materials, with the goal of offering many per-    featured in courses in digital history and digital hu-
spectives on the past, including the perspectives of those   manities, where it has served as a model of sorts for
often excluded from institutional archives (poor people,     how to join storytelling and the archive. It has been
working-class people, trans people, radical activists,       featured in courses on the history of the postwar US,
and so on). Here I think of our “project archives” in the    where its range of documents have allowed students to
sense developed by Phil Deloria and Alexander Olson in       select documents for their self-guided projects. And it
American Studies: A User’s Guide as a “collection with       has come to serve as a “teaching resource” for many
Stefano Morello, ed., American Studies and Digital Archives                                                                 149

journalists and for the greater public. For instance:
when Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden about his                What is the relationship between the team of cre-
previous views on busing, journalists and the public          ators of the project and its holdings?
turned to our project on the desegregation of Berkeley’s      Much of what we publish on the site is in the public
schools to understand the history she drew upon in            domain. Those items that are not in the public domain
her comments. Likewise, after Harris was named the            are generally published by courtesy of those who have
Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party,          offered the items.
many turned to the project on Rainbow Sign (which she
frequented) to understand how her political conscience        R EFERENCES
was ignited during her Berkeley childhood.                    Deloria, Philip J., and Alexander I. Olson. 2017. American Studies,
    Additionally, we are now planning a series of events            A User’s Guide. Oakland: University of California Press.
this coming spring, organized with the Berkeley Public        Rissacher, Tessa and Scott Saul. 2019. “For the Love of People:
Library, that will be keyed to four different projects              Berkeley’s Rainbow Sign and the Secret History of the Black
and will be part of the BPL’s Social Justice series.                Arts Movement.” Current Research in Digital History 2.
In this way, the “Berkeley Revolution” will expand            Saul, Scott. 2014. Becoming Richard Pryor. New York: Harper
beyond the borders of its own domain, and be the                    Collins.
source of community-building efforts that draw together
local East Bay residents with those outside the local
community but with a continued investment in the              Chicory Revitalization Project | http://bit.ly/chicorymag
histories the site curates.
                                                                 Responses by Mary Rizzo, Assistant Professor of
    What were the most challenging aspects of the de-         History at Rutgers University-Newark.
velopment of the project/its curatorial work?
Practically, the most challenging aspect of this site             What is the Chicory Revitalization Project?
is that its production timetable is linked to the             The Chicory Revitalization Project was founded in
semester—and four-and-a-half months is not much time          2018 by a group of educators, cultural workers, writers,
for students to familiarize themselves with the history       and artists in Newark, NJ and Baltimore, MD. The
of the East Bay in the 1960s and 1970s, generate a re-        Project centers on Chicory magazine, an arts-and-poetry
alizable research project, perform the requisite archival     magazine published in Baltimore from 1966-1983 by
work and interviews, and then digitize their primary          the Enoch Pratt Free Library. The magazine published
sources, annotate them, curate them, and compose a            the mostly unedited writing of working-class African
larger essay that frames the story they tell. So the work     American people in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods.
always spills over from the spring semester and into the      It was created and edited by Sam Cornish, who became
summer—which can lead to difficulties, especially if a        the poet laureate of Boston, MA, and was subsequently
student has other obligations.                                edited by Lucian Dixon, Augustus Brathwaite, Melvin
    On another practical note, I think that the most labor-   Brown and Adam Jackson. Chicory described itself as
intensive aspect of the site has been the line-editing that   the “magazine for people who don’t like to write but
I have done (assisted happily, this past spring, by my        have something to say.” Its goal was to be a platform
Berkeley colleague Greg Castillo). It is a truism that        where regular people could express themselves through
every writer needs an editor, and I think that this truism    poetry, essays, and art. Given that official archives
holds doubly for student-writers, for whom our site may       rarely capture the voices of working-class Black people,
be their first time writing history—social history, politi-   Chicory offers historians and other scholars a missing
cal history, cultural history—for a larger public. At the     perspective on the past.
same time, I do believe that this editorial work, on my           In 2014, I rediscovered the magazine in the collec-
part, has also been an important part of the pedagogical      tions of the Pratt library. Recognizing its historic value,
work of the course behind the site: the students learn        I worked with the library to digitize the collection,
how to move from a more purely academic mode of               with financial support from Rutgers University-Newark,
writing (writing for a grade, writing to impress) to a        which is now available online. Thanks to a seed grant
mode of writing that emphasizes cogency, clarity, and         from the Whiting Foundation, I created the Chicory
vividness of description.                                     Revitalization Project to use the power of poetry to
150                                                                                    América Crítica 4(2): 143–155

promote civic dialogue about social justice and place.
The CRP extends Chicory’s model of using vernacular               What is the pedagogical value of the archive?
and written poetry as community expression and civic          Chicory poetry has been used in a variety of pedagog-
dialogue into present-day Baltimore. In addition to           ical settings, including in university and high school
events, the project uses Instagram and Facebook to            classrooms and in writing workshops for young people.
highlight poetry and art from the magazine, putting           Because many of the issues raised by writers in Chicory
them into their historical contexts and examining how         are relevant today, the poems can be the seeds for
they relate to contemporary issues such as the Black          discussions about historical problems, particularly in
Lives Matter movement.                                        African-American urban communities. That the poems
                                                              are written by regular people, though, gives them an
    How do the technologies you used complicate tra-          emotional quality that makes them more engaging to
ditional understandings of “the archive” and the              students than traditional historical documents. For
knowledge structure it seeks to enforce?                      example, college students taking my “Urban History of
Archives are most commonly records of state power             the United States” class at Rutgers University-Newark,
that are the basis for official narratives of history based   learned about urban renewal, disenfranchisement, and
around the state. The Chicory archive is different. As        the Black civil rights and Black Power movements. Stu-
a community publication, it offers a counternarrative,        dents, many of whom grew up in cities like Baltimore,
one in which the voices of working-class African              chose poems from Chicory, and responded to them in
American residents of Baltimore are prioritized. The          audio essays. The students also assigned a location
multiplicity of voices in the magazine make it an             in Baltimore to their chosen poem, thinking about
engaging and sometimes frustrating source—there               how place is represented through poetry. Through a
is no one perspective in it. But in the aggregate,            partnership with the Peale Cultural Center in Baltimore,
Chicory is an archive of the social and political debates     the students’ audio essays were incorporated into
occurring in a tumultuous period of American history.         the Be Here Stories project, which amplifies stories
By reading poetry as a historical source, rather than         by and about Baltimore. This project had multiple
sheerly aesthetically or psychologically, scholars can        outcomes. First, students connected their own lives
find within it counternarratives to the dominant state        and experiences and the experiences of people in the
narratives of the time. For example, after President          past, making material learned in class more meaningful.
Lyndon Johnson created the War on Poverty in 1965,            Secondly, they used historical thinking skills to identify
Baltimore developed its “Plan for Action,” which              a logical location to assign to a poem. Finally, they
detailed how it would use federal funding to eliminate        showed greater enthusiasm for the project because their
poverty, which was concentrated in African-American           work would be available to the public. We’ve made our
communities in the city. This plan argued that black          teaching materials available to anyone. If you’d like
communities were morally and socially deficient and           to incorporate Chicory into classes, please feel free to
needed support to help them become more like white            do so—and let us know! If you have ideas for other
middle-class residents. Chicory magazine’s existence          ways to use Chicory in teaching, I would be excited to
contradicts and subverts these ideas at the foundational      connect.
level. Rather than seeing African Americans as needing
more education or training to become published writers,           What were the most challenging aspects of the de-
Chicory’s editors believed that their community had           velopment of the project/its curatorial work?
its own modes of expression, including through black          In creating the digital archive of the magazine, copy-
vernacular language. By publishing unedited writing,          right was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. Pratt
the editors asserted that their community was not             Library was concerned about who owned the copyright
deficient, but, as the Black Arts Movement argued,            for the magazine. Even though the library had been
had its own aesthetic standards. That Chicory spread          the original publisher, authors never signed any paper-
nationwide, with readers as famous as Ossie Davis,            work regarding copyright or permission to reproduce.
Ruby Dee and Lucille Clifton, and that a collection of        Complicating matters further, many authors used only
its poems was published as the book, Chicory: Young           first names or nicknames when they published, making
Voices from the Black Ghetto in 1969, suggested that          them impossible to find to get permission. Additionally,
they were successful in asserting this message.               many authors were children at the time they published
Stefano Morello, ed., American Studies and Digital Archives                                                            151

in Chicory, raising issues around their legal ability to      is no way to categorize poems by subject. For example,
give permission for reproduction. Because the magazine        a keyword search for “love” would miss poems that are
was published originally with federal funds, the library      about relationships but don’t use that word.
agreed that it should be publicly available. While we             Secondly, the ContentDM system is more familiar to
would remove any item that an author wanted us to, we         scholars and researchers than members of the general
have only heard positive feedback from authors who are        public. A public user of the site may be confused about
excited that their work is online.                            how to navigate through the issues to find what they’re
                                                              looking for. These problems spurred the creation of our
   What is the relationship between the team of cre-          Instagram (@ChicoryB altimore) and associated Face-
ators of the project and its holdings?                        book page. We hope that the public, and, especially,
Our team is eclectic! Because of my research in               young people of color, engage with Chicory. We know
Baltimore and Chicory, I’m the project director, though       that Instagram draws younger users, and has a vibrant
I don’t live in Baltimore. Because, however, we               community of poetry lovers. On our Instagram, we post
take community ownership of history seriously, the            poems and artwork from the magazine and relate them
majority of our team is in Baltimore and represent            to issues happening today. For example, the Black Lives
important Baltimore cultural, educational and historical      Matter protests against police brutality against African
institutions, including the Enoch Pratt Free Library,         American people mirror debates that happened in the
Writers in Baltimore Schools, Dewmore Baltimore,              pages of Chicory in the 1970s. We have highlighted
and Bard Early College High School. Pratt library,            poems about police brutality in the past to show the
as the digital and physical repository for the archive        historical roots of these issues today.
maintains the collections. All programming for the                We have been experimenting with developing a ver-
project comes through the members of the Chicory              sion of the digital archive where each poem is assigned
Revitalization Project. Any member can propose a              metadata, allowing for richer search functionality. In the
program or event, which have included poetry readings,        future, we envision the archive to also include digitized
writing workshops, and public lectures.                       material that contextualizes Chicory, such as oral
                                                              history interviews with former editors and contributors,
   How does the archive deal with the lack of mate-           which I have begun collecting. We’re open to ideas for
riality of the digital?                                       how to improve, so please be in touch!
In 2019, I returned to Pratt library to conduct additional
research in the library’s holdings on Chicory. The first         How is the archive sustained in the long term?
time I encountered Chicory in the library, it was through     Through our partnership with the Enoch Pratt Free Li-
bound versions of the original magazine. This time,           brary, the digital archive of the magazine will be pre-
though, they let me access boxes of the unbound issues.       served indefinitely as part of the Digital Maryland State
I was shocked at how beautiful the artwork looked.            Repository. This was a major goal of ours for digiti-
Flipping through the mimeographed pages, I imagined           zation. While the physical copies of the magazine are
the editors turning the crank on the machine to make          available only in a few libraries in the US, and they have
hundreds of copies of each issue. Unfortunately, that         limited access for users, the digital surrogates will be
experience is unavailable to our digital users. Frankly,      preserved for the foreseeable future.
we haven’t dealt sufficiently with the lack of materiality
due to a lack of resources and time.                          September 11 Digital Archive | https://911digitalarchive.org

    How does your intended audience inform the                   Responses by Megan R. Brett, current September 11
archive’s web infrastructure and its design choices?          Digital Archive project manager, Roy Rosenzweig Center for
One of the infrastructural challenges of the digital          History New Media, George Mason University, Fairfax VA,
                                                              with input from Dr. Stephen Brier and Dr. Tom Scheinfeldt.
archive is the library’s reliance on ContentDM as their
digital repository management system. Because of its
                                                                 What is the September 11 Digital Archive?
structure, ContentDM defines each issue of Chicory            The September 11 Digital Archive is a born-digital collection
magazine as an object, rather than individual poems.          of materials related to people’s experience of the events
While the archive can be keyword searched, a user may         of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath. The archive
not find information they are looking for because there       was created by a team made up of members of the Center
152                                                                                              América Crítica 4(2): 143–155

for History and New Media at George Mason University                  of the September 11 Archive as one of the first fully digital
(CHNM) and the American Social History Project/Center                 archives they had ever agreed to take when the team handed
for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center of the City             over several (not one) hard drives to them. However, as of
University of New York (ASHP). The original team is listed            today, they have yet to figure out how to actually do that,
on our website.                                                       which is why RRCHNM is still stuck with serving the site all
    The project was created to capture digital materials which        these years later.
the original team felt would be essential to any future histori-
cal understanding of the events and aftermath of September                What is the relationship between the team of creators
11. The intended audiences for the archive include people             of the project and its holdings?
wishing to make contributions, historians studying the event,         Creators of the content in the archives retain copyright over
future historians, and individuals worldwide seeking a deeper         the material they submit. Most of the original team have
understanding of the individual impact of the event.                  moved on to other projects and the archive is currently
                                                                      maintained by members of RRCHNM.
    How do the technologies you used complicate tradi-
tional understandings of “the archive” and the knowledge                  How does the archive deal with the lack of materiality
structure it seeks to enforce?                                        of the digital?
The September 11 Archive is one of the first born-digital             The lack of materiality is not an issue, as the archive was
archives in the United States. As such, it deviated from              conceived of specifically to capture born-digital content.
the tradition of donated or professionally-selected materials         Some of the content in the collection—for example the
maintained and stored in a physical location by an individual         response cards from the Smithsonian Museum of American
or institution. Contributions remain the intellectual property        History—have a physical version, but the physical collection
of the donor, and the team which maintains the site are the           is maintained by that institution and the September 11 Digital
custodians—similar to a collection “on deposit” in a more             Archive is only concerned with the scanned item and its
traditional archival setting.                                         metadata. Metadata is key to working with digital mate-
                                                                      rial—this presents a challenge when collecting born-digital
    What is the pedagogical value of the archive?                     content from various publics who may not give much thought
One value of the archive is the breadth of its collections, both      to describing their contributions beyond a title and a very
in participation and temporally. The archive contains not only        short description; the decision for a team working with such
more immediate responses, but collections specifically relat-         material is what, if any, supplementary metadata can or
ing to the fifth, tenth, thirteenth, and fifteenth anniversaries of   should be added to bare-bones submissions.
the event. This allows for the study of memory and memori-
alization as well as immediate responses. Moreover, the ex-               How does your intended audience inform the archive’s
istence of multiple anniversary collections facilitates an ex-        web infrastructure and its design choices?
amination of change over time, taking into account broader            The current version of the site uses the features of Omeka
changes in society in those years.                                    Classic to facilitate user navigation. For example, items are
    Because the platform on which the archive is built (Omeka         grouped into collections based on origin or topic, which
Classic) allows users assigned a “researcher” role to access          allows users various ways to browse through the items in the
the backend of the website, it would be possible for individu-        archives; e.g., everything submitted on the 15th anniversary
als to request research access to the archive in order to study       of the attacks. The site design also prominently features a
patterns such as rates of contribution, geographic location,          keyword search option, for users to explore content based on
etc. To that end, the archive includes—and was a test case            their own interests.
for—two Omeka plugins for distant reading: Text Analysis
and NGram. These plugins allow a researcher or other admin-               How is the archive sustained in the long term?
istrative user of the Omeka installation to run topic modelling
                                                                      As mentioned above, after the first year of collecting, a hard
software such as Mallet on the content of the collection, or
                                                                      drive with the collection to date was delivered to the Library
view it through NGrams. For examples, please see the case
                                                                      of Congress. In 2011, the project received a Saving Amer-
studies done by Jannelle Legg and Alyssa Fahringer.
                                                                      ica’s Treasures grant from the National Park Service and the
    What were the most challenging aspects of the devel-              National Endowment for the Humanities, which enabled the
opment of the project/its curatorial work?                            transition of the project from a boutique database system to
Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown, members of the original               Omeka Classic. As of Autumn 2020, the sustainability team
project team that spearheaded the September 11 Digital                at RRCHNM is working to ensure long-term stability of the
Archive between 2002 and 2005, fully documented the                   platform, including archiving supplementary material in the
development of the archive in a 2011 essay published on               George Mason University institutional repository, MARS.
Radical History Review (see Further Readings below).
    The issue of sustainability is still being grappled with—in
                                                                      R EFERENCES
2003, the Library of Congress agreed to accession the whole
Stefano Morello, ed., American Studies and Digital Archives                                                                    153

Brier Stephen and Joshua Brown. 2011. “The September 11 Digital     mediums, access to information versus preservation, and
      Archive; Saving the Histories of September 11, 2001.” Rad-    the notion of curation in an archive. While institutional
      ical History Review 111: 101-109. https://doi.org/10.1215/    histories are traditionally framed chronologically, the internet
      01636545-1268731.                                             is inherently a nonlinear medium, essentially based on a
                                                                    web of hyperlinks. As we built the archive and collaborated
                                                                    with various stakeholders, several questions repeatedly arose:
CUNY        Digital   History        Archive      (CDHA)        |   How does one create meaning from a collection of items
https://cdha.cuny.edu                                               that can be accessed from multiple entry points? How much
                                                                    context is needed for individual data points to be understood?
       Responses by Chloe Smolarski, CDHA project coordina-         Complicating the matter is that the CDHA does not house
tor.                                                                primary materials, but rather it provides a platform that
                                                                    anyone with an internet connection can access (and for that
     What is the CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA)?               matter, download). When we talk about preservation, in this
The CDHA is an open, digital public archive and portal              case, it is an abstract concept that entails preserving a story
that gives the CUNY community and the broader public                rather than an actual item. While some argue that open access
online access to a range of materials related to the history        embodies democratic values, others maintain proprietary
of the City University of New York (CUNY). Archives and             sentiments towards knowledge/information. Lastly, at its
CUNY libraries contribute significant historical collections        inception, the CDHA struggled with the notion of curation
and CDHA also accepts materials from individuals whose              as opposed to the traditional definition of an archive—a
lives, in diverse ways, have shaped, and been shaped, by            depository of raw material that only takes on meaning once
CUNY. Faculty, staff, students, archivists, librarians, retirees,   it is turned into something else. Very early in the process,
and alumni have contributed to the university’s democratic          we were committed to creating an archive that would offer
mission and CDHA reflects those efforts. The CDHA is                context. It was important to us that this would be a resource
conducted under the auspices of the American Social History         that would be useful to a range of people interested in
Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate               CUNY’s history, and to do that, we felt like our collections
Center, CUNY.                                                       had to tell a story.
     In many ways, the idea of creating a participatory digital
archive that frames CUNY’s history as a people’s history                What is the pedagogical value of the archive?
comes out of Occupy Wall Street. The flurry of activity,
                                                                    The archive is used in multiple settings across CUNY.
engagement, and the widespread questioning of what policies
                                                                    Stephen Brier has used the archive extensively in his various
lead to the extreme economic disparities experienced in the
                                                                    education history classes for doctoral students at the Graduate
United States created the conditions needed for the CUNY
                                                                    Center, as documented in his “Why the History of CUNY
community at large to begin looking at its history in this
                                                                    Matters” piece in Radical Teacher. His students use the
context. During “Defending Public Higher Education,” a
                                                                    CDHA as they might a “regular archive” to do research for
conference in 2011 co-sponsored by more than a dozen
                                                                    papers and articles for his classes. Likewise, community
institutes and academic departments across CUNY, it became
                                                                    college students have used the archive in writing classes,
evident that the City University lacked a central depository
                                                                    student activists have culled materials from the archive to
for primary materials that would allow the community and
                                                                    create class presentations, library science students have
the greater public, scholars, and laymen alike to create
                                                                    assessed physical collections in the context of their course
connections between the varied movements at CUNY’s and
                                                                    work, and graduate students have relied on the archive as a
NYC’s social fabric. While Stephen Brier, Andrea Vasquez,
                                                                    resource for an open-source RPG. Perhaps most importantly,
and Cynthia Tobar were among a core group of original
                                                                    the CDHA has given undergraduate and graduate students
"creators," there was, at least initially, widespread interest
                                                                    alike a place to frame their own CUNY histories. In some
across CUNY to create this archive. The complicated origin
                                                                    cases, collections reflect on an activist movement that
story of the archive, as well as a list of some of the early
                                                                    involved the individual directly. Other collections were built
participants can be found on the “Our History” page of our
                                                                    around primary materials connected to a student’s particular
website. I joined the team in 2014, when the archive was
                                                                    research interest.
still in the process of defining its scope. content, and the
parameters of its operation.
                                                                        What were the most challenging aspects of the devel-
    How do the technologies you used complicate tradi-              opment of the project/its curatorial work?
tional understandings of "the archive" and the knowledge            Funding has always been a challenge. Even though CUNY
structure it seeks to enforce?                                      is comprised of almost 20 colleges, the project has been
Since working at the CDHA, I have found a clash of cultures         described as “too local.” Additional challenges have included
between an internet ethos and a deeply rooted practice of           having an insider/outsider status. We were creating a
"gatekeeping" surrounding traditional archives. I’ll briefly        different kind of institutional history by building collections
outline below a few thoughts concerning linear/nonlinear            of documents focused on specific moments of change in
154                                                                                               América Crítica 4(2): 143–155

CUNY’s history. We stepped away from more traditional                 tional understandings of “the archive” and the knowledge
ways of managing bureaucratic records, which are often                structure it seeks to enforce?
top-down and prioritize the functions of administrative               Our digital archive is open-source and not behind a paywall.
offices rather than the efforts of students, faculty, staff,          Anyone can submit content and there is no hierarchy of
and local communities to influence university policies and            whose work is featured. Anyone who has projects that relate
programs. This has had the effect of creating tension between         to our themes of anti-bias and anti-racist abolitionist teaching
various stakeholders and the CDHA.                                    can submit their work and have it be featured for free.

    What is the relationship between the team of creators
of the project and its holdings?                                         What is the pedagogical value of the archive?
Many of the collections are spearheaded by an individual              DHK12 is part of an ethical and political imperative for
(retiree, student, alum, staff, etc.) who was directly in-            a growing number of teachers and scholars committed to
volved with the collection’s content. It’s exciting to be part        accountable and reciprocal research practices and knowledge-
of a project that creates a platform for people, often from           sharing. As producers of an open-access interdisciplinary
marginalized communities, to tell their own stories.                  curriculum and network, we are organizing academic knowl-
                                                                      edge production away from the profit motive of textbook
R EFERENCES                                                           publishers. Instead, we use primary source documents and
                                                                      digital archives, and work collaboratively with local cultural
Brier, Stephen. 2017. “Why the History of CUNY Matters: Using         institutions to teach DH thinking and skills to primary and
       the CUNY Digital History Archive to Teach CUNY’s Past”.
                                                                      secondary school students. DHK12 develops projects to
       Radical Teacher 108: 28-35. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2017.
       357.                                                           teach students and teachers how to use computational text
                                                                      analysis, digital mapping and timelines, image processing,
                                                                      and 3D modeling to develop new epistemologies, ontologies,
                                                                      and ways of knowing and understanding public humanities
Digital Humanities K12 | https://www.dhk12.com                        and societal engagement.
                                                                          Our digital indigenous studies project, “The Red At-
   Responses by Rosie Jayde Uyola, independent scholar,               lantic,” built in the Fall and Spring 2018-2019 explored
K-12 teacher, documentary filmmaker, and researcher of                “internal settler colonialism” versus “external imperial
memory, commemoration, and Black Life and Culture.                    colonialism.” K-12 students in NYC photographed dioramas
                                                                      and mounted exhibits at the American Museum of Natural
    What is DHK12?                                                    History (AMNH) and built a digital archive that places the
DHK12 is a free, unrestricted, online open-access collab-             museum’s narrative side by side with historical and artistic
orative network of educators who seek to use digital tools            representations of culture created by indigenous scholars.
to make the humanities come to life for students; draw on             Our objective was to use digital tools to decolonize the
the scholarship of women and people of color to diversify             museum and open up spaces for indigenous scholars and
curricula; support students as they do the work of historians         artists within locations traditionally identified with dominant
by creating knowledge.                                                representations of colonialism. As a local and international
    DHK 12 is a self-hosted project I created without any             public space, AMNH is a powerful producer of historical
institutional or external support. Over the past two years, I         narratives and our digital archive seeks to re-center the voices
launched two digital projects—built by students, the people           and ontologies of indigenous scholars within the episte-
who will need the tools to deal with the complexities of              mological “origins story” of the American continent. Our
the future—that will contribute to public scholarship in              future plans include partnering with a K-12 school in London
digital indigenous studies, digital black studies, Africana and       to build phase two of our archive, in which we decolonize
diasporic studies, digital queer studies, and digital feminist        the representations of indigeneity at the Natural History
studies. With these interdisciplinary and transnational,              Museum by placing current exhibitions and collections in
student-driven digital archive projects (as such, they are            conversations with contemporary work created by indigenous
always in process, as we are always adding new data), we              scholars and artists.
will build complex models of memory and commemoration,                    A second project, “Rainbow is Enuf” was developed in
analysing our data with computational methods and commu-              Spring and Fall of 2019. Rainbow is Enuf is a digital archive
nicating the results to a broader public.                             documenting the remarkable tenacity of black women, trans
    As a K-12 teacher and junior scholar in American Studies,         women, and femmes’ visual, cultural, and political influence
I hope to build partnerships with DH scholars worldwide to            on American history. This black joy and black excellence
continue to develop interdisciplinary K-12 digital humanities         archive draws on and contributes to digital black studies,
curricula that use and contribute to interdisciplinary scholar-       digital queer studies, and digital feminist studies. Currently,
ship, teaching, and creative student-centered work.                   in public and independent schools, children learn about
                                                                      black American life by studying enslavement, the 13th
   How do the technologies you used complicate tradi-                 Amendment of the US Constitution, Jim Crow Laws, redlin-
Stefano Morello, ed., American Studies and Digital Archives                                                               155

ing/blockbusting of housing, and most recently, the prison       it could receive more submissions. However, currently, I am
industrial complex. To offer students an opportunity to un-      grateful for all of the amazing Black, Indigenous, and People
derstand the complexities of these histories more completely,    of Colour scholars who have submitted ideas for projects
our project combines digital research and digital production     which are currently posted on the website.
that allows students to explore the joy and excellence of
black labor and resistance through the study of music, film,
dance, art, comedy, theatre, and food. Students used digital         What is the relationship between the team of creators
resources such as Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)       of the project and its holdings?
and Stanford’s Tooling up for DH. The historiography of the      I built this digital archive to truly be an abolition-teaching
project highlights and centers contributions of black women      tool. It’s free, doesn’t collect user data (such as emails or
as creators of knowledge. By presenting students with new        passwords) and doesn’t require those who benefit from it to
information using primary sources and giving voice and           contribute back in any way (unless they choose to). DHK-12
volume to marginalized histories, we seek to decolonize US       is an offering of abundance to support educators and students
History curricula.                                               across divisional levels to incorporate anti-racist teaching
                                                                 and learning in their curricula and to also explicitly promote
   What were the most challenging aspects of the devel-          the scholarship of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour,
opment of the project/its curatorial work?                       especially those who are women, queer, trans, and gender
Because I am personally building all parts of the archive        non-binary. Our archive centers often marginalized histories
myself, using my own time and resources, it can be a lot of      and voices through both content and historiography.
work. I also could use help with promoting the project so that
