Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities is a project based at James Madison University, established in 2022 by Iliana Cosme-Brooks (graduate student at the School of Writing, Rhetoric & Technical Communication), Mollie Godfrey (Associate Professor of English & African, African American, and Diaspora Studies), Kevin Hegg (Head of Digital Projects, JMU Libraries’ Digital Scholarship and Distinctive Collections), and Seán McCarthy (Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication).
As they note on their About page, the group invited students and collaborators on a “data-gathering, mapping, and visualization adventure” with the goal “to make projects such as Celebrating Simms and many, many others more visible and better able to connect with, learn from, and support one another.”
We highly recommend exploring their map and database, where you’ll find several projects from NYU DH including:
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Black Solidarity Day is a digital exhibition curated by Jasmine Sykes-Kunk, Janet Bunde and Shannon O’Neill and built by Marii Nyrop. Using archival materials held by NYU Special Collections on Black Solidarity Day, the project set out to build a space for community connection and greater awareness of this annual day of protest created in 1969 by Dr. Carlos Russell.
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Raising the Volume! Amplifying the Soul of Reason was a cross-departmental initiative at NYU led by Janet Bunde, Alexandra Provo, Jasmine Sykes-Kunk, Marii Nyrop, and Steven Fullwood. Aiming to transform a historically and culturally rich radio program on Black and Latino culture into a collaboratively curated collection dataset, the project team hosted a series of transcribe-a-thon events, supported a data science project using topic modelling techniques, and contributed to Wikidata through an wiki edit-a-thon event. This project was supported by an NYU DH Seed Grant.
If you would like to add a project to the map, the Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities team provides a form on their contact page. Let us know (dh.help at nyu dot edu) if you do!
