Digital Humanities
I have contributed to three large-scale digital humanities projects at major institutions and am in the early stages of building my own. I am a strong believer in the wealth that the humanities has to offer to digital studies, and what is more, what critical black inquiry has to offer to digital methods. I am also intrigued by the possibilities for analysis and exhibition that digital tools open up for humanistic research.
Chicago Kitchenette Archive
My digital humanities mapping and archival database project, Chicago Kitchenette Archive, extends my book project on kitchenette apartment buildings. I have worked with a team of student research assistants to collect, organize, analyze, and extract relevant data from the scattered and qualitatively sparse archive of Chicago kitchenette documentation. We devised methods to identify and tag sources with indicators to capture the spectrum of certainty of kitchenette mentions in newspaper articles, housing violation court records, documentary photography, and other sources. We are using AirTable and Google Drive to organize and analyze at this stage and have begun the process of integrating the documents and data into Omeka.
As a 2019-20 CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Data Curation, I worked with the award-winning Colored Conventions Project (CCP) at the University of Delaware on website usability, data curation strategy, database development, and workflow enhancement. In Fall 2019, I led the remote and in-person website beta testing, collecting and distilling feedback to guide iterative website enhancement in preparation for the site’s relaunch. In Spring 2020, I supervised and managed a group of senior capstone students in conceptual database development and improved search functionality in Omeka. Read more about my website work here.
At the University of California, Berkeley, I served as Research Associate for the Louisiana Slave Conspiracies project from 2016-2018. I worked through insights from African American Studies and Black geographic thought to research and present historical maps, think through representing archival silences and contradictions, and extract, organize, and analyze data. For the project, I helped write and secure an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. I also co-taught the “Mapping for Humanists” course at the week-long Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute using the LSC as a case study.
At the University of Richmond, I worked as a Research Assistant in the Digital Scholarship Lab on the Visualizing Emancipation project in 2011. I extracted and coded data from digitized U.S. Civil War correspondence to identify wartime instances of emancipation and self-manumission of enslaved people. These data were transformed into an interactive digital map.