10
Digital Reconnaissance
Re(Locating) Dark Spots on a Map
Jamila Moore Pewu
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, the Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses are the only surviving architectural landmarks of a unique nineteenth-century community of free people of color, who aptly renamed their neighborhood “Little Liberia” in the 1850s. Bridgeport’s Little Liberians were Black and Native American people who thrived along the banks of the Long Island Sound, and they combined community organizing with entrepreneurship to create an organic community that remained self-sufficient for more than four decades beginning in the 1820s. Oral tradition asserts that the change from the community’s original name “Ethiope” to “Little Liberia” coincided with the West African colony’s transition from colony to independent republic in 1847.1 Prior to this date and since its inception, Liberia had been controlled by the American Colonization Society (ACS) and its auxiliary branches. The ACS began transporting Black emigrants from the Americas to the West African colony in 1820 to limit the growing and unwanted population of free Blacks in the United States. Yet, for those free people of color and former slaves who voluntarily emigrated to Liberia, the colony represented an opportunity to experience true moral, personal, and political freedom.2 Thus, in adopting the place name “Liberia,” which echoes “Freedom for all men,” residents in Bridgeport’s peri-urban, multiethnic enclave would test and trouble the very definitions of freedom in the Antebellum North.
Despite Little Liberia’s rich legacy, which included physical and ideological crossings throughout various Black Atlantic sites, urban renewal, civic disinvestment, postindustrial decline, and environmental racism almost rendered this history invisible to the contemporary landscape. In fact, when former Bridgeport City Historian Charles Brilvitch uncovered the history behind the Freeman Houses in the 1990s, the South End neighborhood that was once Little Liberia seemed like a failed urban environment. The community that thrived in the 1850s was replaced by three public housing projects built between 1941 and 1954. By the 1980s, the area was marred by crime and violence, and any plans to redevelop it beyond a postindustrial outpost for utility companies had either stalled or stopped altogether. In addition, natural elements like wind, rain, and snow had become even more threatening to the surviving architecture than human intervention or a lack thereof. Yet, the biggest threat to this endangered site was time itself. Over time the story of the site was told and retold in slightly conflicting ways, and community engagement peaked, dipped, and waned, as did the site’s importance to local politics. Therefore, stakeholders were constantly reaffirming the importance of this site against an ever-changing urban landscape.3
In this sense, Bridgeport’s Little Liberia is like many forgotten and endangered eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African diasporic historic sites, in which answers to the questions of how and why communities drew on spatial attributes from elsewhere to invent new ways of being and becoming in the modern world lie deep underground. Without unfettered access to skilled archaeologists, external funding, and sustained community engagement, these sites are limited in their ability to provide answers to pertinent historical questions. Historic sites that are successful at harnessing all of these resources often are the exception, not the rule. In the United States alone, there are an estimated 1,912 sites listed in the National Register of Historic Places database as having significance to “Black” heritage. Of these, about 278 have historical significance dating to before 1850.4 The numbers continue to drop the further back in time one goes, with fewer than thirty sites being listed before 1750, the majority of which are burial grounds. At first glance, these numbers seem impressive, but given that there are more than 95,000 sites in the National Register and a listing alone does not protect a site from threats of improper development, deferred maintenance, neglect, misuse, or outright demolition, identifying historic places becomes a first step in recognizing and preserving African diasporic spatial histories for our future. What is now needed is a more sustainable method of recovery.
This chapter advances the use of “digital reconnaissance,” which is a methodology of recovery rooted in Black Studies, spatial analysis, and digital humanities. Digital reconnaissance assists African diasporic sites that are in danger of being wiped off the map by mobilizing digital tools to visually and intellectually recover, re-create, and reimagine these sites within their broader spatial histories.5 Digital reconnaissance implores us to use digital technologies to create “bigger, smarter humanities data sets” for endangered and forgotten African diasporic sites and, in particular, to use digital mapping platforms to visually recover the spatial imaginations that preconditioned how these sites first appeared on—or disappeared from—historical maps and local archives.6 As such, digital mapping, or rather remapping, becomes a critical tool in expanding or contesting narrow spatial histories. Yet, far from suggesting mapping for mapping’s sake—or the disengaged deployment of mapping technologies—this methodology calls on digital humanists to use digital tools including, but not limited to, web-based mapping platforms, GIS, and data visualization methods for investigation, intervention, and eventually the creation of born digital content and resources for the historically marginalized public sphere.
I first began thinking through this methodology in 2011 while documenting grassroots efforts to save and restore the Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses. They were built by two sisters with Native American ancestry who fully belonged to Bridgeport’s nineteenth-century “colored” community, which itself was a mix of Native Americans from Connecticut’s Golden Hill and Turkey Hill Paugussett tribes; runaway slaves from Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and other parts of the south; and people of African ancestry who were newly freed or born free in the Northeast.7 Despite the fluidity with which people, goods, and ideas moved throughout Little Liberia in the nineteenth century, the contemporary narrative of this site was fixed in both space and time, with its “origins” and futures being restricted to purely local contexts. This fixity produced a static, linear narrative that translated well for creating a “historic place” on paper, but it did not fully account for the spatiality of daily life in Little Liberia or the nuanced ways that multiple cultural productions from throughout the Atlantic world contributed to the site’s construction.
Little Liberia is not novel because it was a nonwhite space in the Antebellum North; it is novel because it was a dynamic space that was birthed through multiple ways of inhabiting, politicizing, and centering Blackness independently of whiteness in the nineteenth century. At its peak, Little Liberia was teeming with Black seamen, steamboat cooks, and stevedores whose social and political networks stretched across the waters of the Long Island Sound, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and even the Pacific Ocean. Thus, the research questions that haunt this site are not only humanistic but are also methodological and inextricably rooted in a burgeoning subfield of digital humanities referred to as Black spatial humanities.
During the 2019 Humanities Intensive Teaching and Learning (HILT) session on Black spatial humanities led by Kim Gallon, humanities scholars and practitioners discussed how to best design digital projects that critically engage Black spatial imaginations without getting stuck in Black/white spatial binaries in which Blackness and Black humanity in particular always appear as the “sign of a lack.”8 This question captures some of the methodological concerns that arise when linking Africana/Black Studies with spatial humanities, but a more precise query might also be this: Can digital maps and other spatial technologies provide us with new ways of conceptualizing, documenting, redefining, or relocating the humanity/inhumanity placed on, attributed to, or celebrated by Black people? As we discover from the works compiled in The Digital Black Atlantic volume, the short answer is yes.
Setha Low asserts that, when they are combined, traditional ethnographic practices, mental maps, activity maps, movement maps, photographs, drawings, and other spatial techniques make up the “methods toolbox” for understanding the role of culture in the construction of space and place.9 Similarly, historical archival research, ethnographic and participatory fieldwork, open-source digital tools, a variety of hand-drawn and computer-generated maps, and other spatial techniques make up the methods toolbox for digital reconnaissance. As a methodology of recovery, digital reconnaissance serves to (re)place endangered or forgotten sites on the map and to map them again, but this time within the contexts of what I call “spatial fluency.” Spatial fluency is the ability to recognize, access, or be subtly aware not only of one’s own subjective spatial environment but also of those of others who may be geographically and/or temporally distant. Underlying the notion of spatial fluency is the idea that all sites speak to something, someone, or some other site from the past, the present, or the site’s intended future and that traces of this language become inscribed into the physical landscape and the ways inhabitants interact with that landscape.
Like many African diasporic historic sites, Little Liberia is the product of multiple crossings and multiple spatial imaginations (or ways of seeing, ordering, and inhabiting space). However, the local and global legacies of these historic sites often become obscured by what Jeremy Prestholdt refers to as the “presumption of historical insularity.”10 It is this presumption that human history unfolded within geographically or culturally bounded spaces that makes our present moments of globality seem novel and unprecedented when in fact they are not. W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Paul Gilroy, Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Rebecca Scott, and Sylviane Diouf have all proven in different ways that Black Atlantic spaces have always been global, so to talk of globality and global flows as if they were new occurrences silences centuries of interactions between countries and continents.11 For this reason, I suggest that the ports, cities, countries, and even continents that shape the geographic body known as the Black Atlantic be remapped in ways that make the spatial continuities and ruptures embodied within transatlantic movement much more visible.
Thus, digital reconnaissance uses digital tools not just to see African diasporic historic sites as they are today or as they appeared in the past but also to see them in their simultaneities while also recovering the ideological blueprints that informed how founding communities viewed the site in relation to other sites; how they believed the site should be laid out, including architectural styles, roads, and place names; and finally, who should be allowed to inhabit the site and who should be excluded. This epistemological framework prompts us to view African diasporic historic sites as palimpsestic spaces or polyvocal landscapes in which competing and coexisting spatial imaginations from various time periods and geographic locations shape spatial interactions and identities within the site.12
Digital Reconnaissance in Practice
Having outlined the theoretical questions and historic problem spaces that inform digital reconnaissance, I spend the rest of this chapter outlining the general contours of this methodology and discussing how specific digital tools can be deployed throughout each stage of the recovery process: investigation, intervention, and the creation of newly born digital content. I also address how specific tools and platforms are particularly useful for advancing community or grassroots processes of recovery. Finally, I expand on the broader implications of digital reconnaissance for the multidisciplinary fields of digital humanities, Black Studies, cultural geography, and critical archive studies.
Digital reconnaissance first calls on the use of digital tools to investigate African diasporic historic sites. In the investigation stage, traditional archival research methods are merged with open-source digital archives and databases, data visualization tools, and other free resources to gather initial data on an endangered or forgotten historic site. This first stage also involves extracting meaning from user-generated web content such as blogs, wikis, government and independent websites, YouTube comments, social media platforms, and Google Earth. All of these data are then combined to amass an emerging digital archive that can be used to discover important themes and networks as they relate to a particular historic site. Thus, digital reconnaissance turns the research process into a virtual scavenger hunt, whereby scant references, collections, or media that make their way to the web can become tools for finding the next clue. Sometimes these clues lead back to traditional archival materials, and at other times they lead deeper into an emerging digital archive.
Over the years I have taught this research method to undergraduate students in my U.S. social history course, in which they investigate an endangered or forgotten African diasporic site and critically evaluate the data they find, where they find it, and its accessibility. Although I encourage students to make use of any and all data sources, they surprisingly shy away at first from using nontraditional sources, such as independent websites and social media. At other times, there are so few resources available about a site that the students assume the lack of published material such as books and articles or verified websites means that there is no information about a historic site. However, digital reconnaissance challenges us not to just accept a lack of information but also to question why that lack exists.
I have found that a lack of digital media or content about a particular historic site often says just as much as having a plethora of potential source material to sift through. Contemporary Bridgeport provides the best example of this point because for years there were very few references to the city’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American contributions in physical archives, digital archives, or websites. Outside of what has been compiled by Charles Brilvitch, the Bridgeport History Center, and my own research including oral history interviews, the African diasporic presence in the city has suffered from obscurity—even in the digital age. For some urban residents, the dearth of accessible information on the city’s Black cultural and political life from the nineteenth century through the present reflects broader feelings of unbelonging in the city.13
Until recently, Wikipedia contained the most information about Bridgeport’s Freeman Houses and the Little Liberia community, but with varying degrees of historical accuracy; this was followed by freemancenterbpt.org, a website created in 2012 by the Mary & Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, Inc. The Freeman Center is the nonprofit organization that owns the Freeman Houses and oversees their restoration. Yet, since the Freeman Houses were named one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places® in June 2018, there has been increased pressure to enhance the digital presence of this severely understaffed historic site. Thus, the assemblage of an emerging digital archive is central to the process of recovery for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African diasporic sites because it makes the Black presence in the archive more accessible even while it appears as a lack. In addition, the emerging digital archive shifts the structure of power away from professional archivists to community stakeholders so that “experts” and “nonspecialists” can work together to determine which histories are made legible through the archive. Contributors in the spring 2006 special issue of Archivaria, “Archives, Space and Power,” emphasize how digital archival collections may yield more participatory forms of engagement than traditional collections. In particular, they highlight that digital archives are spaces in which knowledge and power over what gets selected for permanent retention might be shared between professional archivists and their institutions and nonprofessionals or, in the case of many historic sites, community stakeholders.14
During the second stage of my research and a key part of it, I made purposeful interventions into the existing archive using digital tools. As a first step I created a research blog in 2010, which at the time provided the most effective way to share project news and information with a wider public. Through this platform, I was able to connect with a descendant of the nineteenth-century Little Liberia community, who happened to have maintained a meticulous personal archive that includes stories and artifacts predating the family’s time in Little Liberia. As a result of this virtual encounter, one family’s personal archive has helped expand and corroborate the overall narrative on Little Liberia. I also conducted oral history interviews with people who lived, worked, worshipped, or played in Little Liberia during the twentieth century, and I donated these audio files to the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center.
Both of these initiatives expanded the available “archive” of material on Little Liberia, yet much of this data was still stored on various servers and individual desktops. In fact, the more the digital archive expanded, the more important it became to think critically about the historic site’s digital infrastructure. Primarily, how could we bring all of this data together to provide Little Liberia stakeholders with more control over the historic site’s intellectual identity and grant easy access to new scholarship? To begin answering this question I worked with the Freeman Center to design phase one of the “Freeman Center Digital Hub,” which is an online repository in which data (documents, still images, moving images, audio, structural reports, physical objects, etc.) that were once scattered across disparate analog and digital channels could be carefully integrated into a single content management system using Omeka. When completed, this hub will serve as an interactive meeting place for scholars, educators, descendants, community partners, and online visitors interested in the contemporary and historical works surrounding Little Liberia and the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center. The Freeman Center Digital Hub will not only host an emerging digital archive in public but will also facilitate opportunities for collaboration among the Freeman Center’s consultants, scholars, and community partners.15
In addition to their use in investigation, digital tools can also serve as methods of intervention by using one or more web platforms, devices, or computing languages to begin physically or ideologically remapping a site. In my work, digital reconnaissance takes on the form of a collaborative mapping platform that relies on user-generated content to produce, present, and disseminate vital spatial data on endangered and forgotten Black Atlantic sites and histories. The first prototype of this map, titled the Black Atlantic Map, was created in 2013 using TimeMap and Google Maps.16 The strength of this prototype was its ability to visualize color-coded networks and movement between Black Atlantic sites over time and space, similar to the more recent Mapping Paintings open-source platform created by Jodi Cranston.17 Cranston’s platform is designed to make smart use of provenance data or metadata about artwork to visualize its movement over time and space. Mapping Paintings also gives users the opportunity to contribute data to the site, thereby expanding the database, while making that data “smart” through customizable or curated maps. At the time of its creation the Black Atlantic Map prototype was poised to take on these same roles for African diasporic sites, but it was plagued by a rather bulky interface that did not seamlessly display space and time data, a problem that has been ameliorated in subsequent digital tools.
Although desktop geographic information systems (GIS), such as ESRI, AutoCAD Map, and Community Remarks, make this kind of complex multilayered mapping feasible for the scholar and cultural resource manager, they can also hinder digital reconnaissance because stakeholders from underrepresented communities who are looking to save an endangered site without leveraging institutional support for costly software and training may not have access to them. Free, public-facing digital tools like Google Maps, Open Layers, Sapelli, and even History Pin offer communities more cost-effective ways to make significant spatial interventions by allowing them to collaboratively map their environments, share historical authority, and curate stories from the past and the present simultaneously.18 One caution, however, about only using completely open-source tools is that they too can place African diasporic sites at a disadvantage when their systems are no longer supported by a community of users and developers or they are bought for private use. As the African diasporic historic site moves from being endangered and forgotten to active and engaged, it is ever more important that community stakeholders retain authorship and ownership of their cultural heritage, digital footprint, and intellectual histories as opposed to “renting” them, even from well-meaning third-party platforms.
This brings us to the final work that digital reconnaissance must do, which is to aid in the creation of newly born digital content that expands the temporal and geographic boundaries of a particular historic site. On their own, most endangered sites are rooted in their local contexts, which include local histories, libraries, historical societies, and community engagement. Although virtual exhibits are a great way to create born digital content on a historic site, spatial fluency implores us to make broader geographic connections that will supply new layers of meaning, provide new opportunities for collaborative research, and allow new spatial imaginations to take shape. Some of these new layers are best expressed through user-friendly deep maps with commitments to open-ended exploration.19 Deep maps aid processes of recovery because they go beyond GIS to provide spatial humanists with ways of perceiving both real and conceptual space and the past and the present simultaneously.20 We may also borrow from the distributed museum concept by using virtual spaces and mobile technology to embed historical data throughout transient spaces.21 In the past, this has looked like wireless street kiosks that educate passersby on the endangered or forgotten site or strategically placed QR codes on the exteriors of private residences and small businesses that reveal vital information about an endangered or forgotten site. However, when paired with the most compatible technologies used to create digital projects designed for the public, these efforts can do so much more.
One example is the Long Beach, California–based nonprofit, We Are the Next, and its proposed urban intervention project, For the Record.22 This project aims to produce an interactive timeline with digital components located right along a city sidewalk in North Long Beach. It is designed to intervene in the city’s current development boom by providing urban stakeholders with access to at least 200 years of neighborhood history that will encompass the lives and contributions of all of the area’s marginalized populations.23 A similarly interventionist mapping project is Dr. Andrea Roberts’s Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas. The Atlas, a born digital resource, has mapped over three hundred unmapped free Black settlements that were established throughout the State of Texas after the U.S. Civil War.24 However, Roberts is not only interested in placing these sites on a map for documentary purposes but also in collecting and disseminating new narratives on Black preservation and redefining planning agendas in these largely unincorporated spaces—many of which have been historically excluded from local planning efforts.25
Ultimately these types of immersive and interventionist mapping projects are intended to purposefully disrupt or expand the existing spatial histories in a city, neighborhood, or region. Thus, whether through social justice mapping, creating a mobile walking tour, or actually embedding information into the physical landscape, the goal of the intervention is to imagine new futures that are produced for, by, and through the African diaspora. This is the same work that is advocated in The Digital Black Atlantic broadly. Virtual and augmented reality, mapping, and spatial analytics, as well as interdisciplinary collaborative research and open educational resources (OER), represent key tools and approaches within the digital humanities. But when deployed within a Black Atlantic framework that places Africa and African-descended populations at its center, these technologies can help expand public engagement with marginalized spatial histories while situating them within broader conversations.
Broader Implications
This chapter is conversant with recent scholarship in Black digital humanities, Black geographies, and digital geographies in human and cultural geography, critical archive studies, and material culture because it does not just advocate putting African diasporic history on the internet but also uses digital tools to reconstruct histories that have been both passively and purposefully rendered invisible over time.26 Like Gerald Vizenor’s “Ishi Obscura,” the half-dead subjects who moan from the pages of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Sharon Patricia Holland’s Raising the Dead: Readings on Death and Black Subjectivity, many African diasporic historic sites haunt their present landscapes. For the scholar or independent researcher, these sites burden, bother, and beg more questions for which there are usually few answers. Digital reconnaissance directly responds to this haunting by engaging Black digital humanities as a “technology of recovery.”
This process of recovery continues the political work of Black Studies by recovering lost or unknowable histories and reading against the existing canon through the use of digital platforms and tools.27 As a methodology, digital reconnaissance embodies the potential of the digital Black Atlantic as outlined by Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam in this volume, because it not only recovers lost or unknowable spatial legacies but also serves to engage the full humanity of marginalized people within those spaces by generating new discourses on Black humanity and Black subjectivities past, present, and future.28
Trouillot discerned that, “culturally, the world we inherit today is the product of global flows that started in the late fifteenth century and continue to affect human populations today. Yet the history of the world is rarely told in those terms.”29 Thus, he implores historical anthropology to bring these flows into public consciousness, lest “master terms” that continue to shape Black Atlantic communities such as progress, development, modernity, nation-state, and globalization go underexplored. This call for scholarship that is intrinsically public facing is also one that public digital humanists have increasingly championed via the Disrupting the Digital Humanities essay collection, the “Doing Digital Archives in Public Manifesto,” and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.30
Digital reconnaissance offers new opportunities for scholarly and community engagement in Black Studies, because it supports an expanded definition of diaspora as both a process and a condition. This notion of diaspora as a nonlinear process and condition was first advanced in 2000 by Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley as they explored the contingent making and remaking of diaspora along legal, cultural, economic, imperial, and social lines.31 In this sense diaspora can have many and multiple occurrences, subtractions, and negations, all of which can produce a myriad of diasporic subjectivity. Since the early 2000s, Black digital humanities has critically engaged the use of computational tools, platforms, and devices to demonstrate, probe, and deinstitutionalize the fluid and multinodal experiences of the African diaspora. Whether it is through early calls for an eBlack Studies agenda out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the recent “Black Code Studies” special issue of The Black Scholar, or the Digital Black Atlantic volume in which this work appears, the physical and virtual conditions of Blackness are being called to heightened levels of critical engagement.
Likewise, because digital reconnaissance relies on the concept of spatial fluency in the Black Atlantic, it shifts the epistemological focus in cultural geography from one in which Africa has largely been peripheral to the processes in which theories about space and place are made to one in which Africa and its descendants become both sources and resources for new concepts on modernity, urbanity, and globality. Celebrated author Edwidge Danticat articulates ideas that best resonate with the concept of spatial fluency when reflecting on the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat: “Haiti, like Puerto Rico and the continent of Africa, was obviously both in Basquiat’s consciousness and in his DNA, but they were not there by themselves. Basquiat did not belong to any fixed collective. He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographic traditions.”32
Ultimately, digital reconnaissance demonstrates the interventionist potential of digital humanities, because it provides a methodology for pairing specific theoretical concerns of space and place with the humanistic goals of reimagining endangered and forgotten African diasporic places.33 When scholars and communities uses digital tools to re(locate) forgotten and erased African diasporic sites on a map, they also disrupt hegemonic archives and mappings in which Black geographies were seemingly unavailable or unknowable. In turn, this disruption or remapping creates new opportunities for engaging with contemporary Black Atlantic communities and their efforts to reimagine the spaces around them.
Notes
Brilvitch, A History of Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe.
See Clegg, The Price of Liberty; Dunn et al., Historical Dictionary of Liberia; Holsoe and Belcher, A Land and Life Remembered; Banton, More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic.
Throughout this chapter the term “site” is used to refer to physical spaces or the geographic boundaries that constitute a historic place, and the term “website” is used to refer to digital spaces.
These figures were retrieved from the NPS database in October 2017 and do not reflect new records submitted since this date. See National Park Service, “Npgallery Digital Asset Search.”
These tools can include, but are not limited to, open-source mapping platforms, social media platforms, wikis, websites, 3-D modeling, virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), and other interactive online media.
For more on what this phrase means for data collection and analysis see Schöch, “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy?”
Brilvitch, A History of Connecticut’s Golden Hill Paugussett Tribe.
Mbembe, On the Postcolony.
Gieseking et al., The People, Place, and Space Reader, xxii.
Prestholdt, Domesticating the World, 1.
Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals.”
This use of palimpsest builds on Marshall and coauthors’ use of palimpsest as a methodological approach for understanding competing and coexisting urban experiences. See Marshall et al., “Narrating Palimpsestic Spaces.”
Based on oral history interviews conducted by Jamila Moore Pewu for the Little Liberia Neighborhood Project.
See Joan Schwartz, “Having New Eyes: Spaces of Archives, Landscapes of Power,” and Charles W.J. Withers and Andrew Grout, “Creating a Digital Web-based Map Archive,” in Archivaria 61, special issue, “Archives, Space and Power,” spring 2006.
Mears, “Doing Digital Archives in Public Manifesto.”
See Moore Pewu screenshots available at http://jamilapewu.com/the-black-atlantic-map-my-first-attempt/.
See Cranston, Mapping Paintings at http://www.mappingpaintings.org.
There is another category of tool available: the “freemium” or “pay as you go” cloud-based software services like Carto, Mapme, and Mapbox Studio.
See Ridge et al., “Creating Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives through Design,” 178. For more on this, see Mattern, Deep Mapping the Media City.
Bodenhamer, “An Exploration of Deep Maps.”
Bautista and Balsamo, “Understanding the Distributed Museum.”
We Are the Next, “For the Record,” accessed January 24, 2020, http://www.wearethenext.org/fortherecord.
Morris, “We Are the Next Announces New North Long Beach Project during Local Fundraising Event.”
Roberts and Biazar, The Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas & Study.
See The Texas Freedom Colonies Atlas Version 2.0.
The use of the term “Black digital humanities” is directly related to Kim Gallon’s definition of work that is situated at the intersection of Black Studies and digital humanities and produced by “black digerati” both in and outside of the academy.
Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.”
Josephs and Risam, introduction to this volume.
Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals,” 34.
See Stommel, “The Public Digital Humanities”; Mears, “Doing Digital Archives in Public Manifesto”; and Gold and Klein, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.
Patterson and Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations.”
Danticat, Create Dangerously.
This deep thinking about theory and practice within digital humanities specifically as they relate to humanistic goals is one that Tanya Clement advocates in “Where Is Methodology in Digital Humanities?”
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