- The nearly $100,000 award will fund a project supporting communities excluded from the historical record -
Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington are part of a team that was recently awarded a 2024 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grant. The nearly $100,000 award will fund “Archiving Out of the Box,” a project that supports communities who are excluded from the historical record.
The Archiving Out of the Box project team includes Kalani Craig, Associate Professor in the Department of History within the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington, Michelle Dalmau, Associate Librarian in Wells Library; Vanessa Elias Information Specialist in Digital Humanities & User Engagement at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and Jazma Sutton (Ph.D. 2022), a History professor at Miami University; and community partners from Indiana and Ohio.
This year’s ACLS Digital Justice Grants supports digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that “critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods,” according to ACLS. The awarded digital humanities projects “engage audiences both inside and outside of academic institutions, and count among their grantees librarians, independent scholars, and cultural heritage institution workers.” The Institute’s grant is one of 17 issued this year by ACLS, and the program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
“Public history and community archives are a big part of what my colleagues and I do, in part because my project collaborators and I have backgrounds in communities from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, where our records in formal archives are harder to find” Craig explained: “Diasporic communities often don’t bring records with them, and a lot of large scale, formal institutional archives aren’t interested in those stories. They have other priorities.”
The impetus for the project grant originated about five years ago at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH, now part of the Institute for Advanced Studies), where Craig, Dalmau, Elias and Sutton worked with IDAH and IU Bloomington’s Center for Research on Race, Ethnicity and Society on several “history harvests” with help from a University of Cincinnati colleague, public historian Rebecca Wingo. “Rebecca helped a community of Detroit residents in a neighborhood called Rondo reconnect their community, a historically black community, which was divided in 1950s and 60s by a freeway,” noted Craig. “As a result, residents of Rondo at the time soon discovered a four-minute walk to a neighbor’s house had turned into a 30-minute drive.”
As Rondo’s elders moved on or died, the community decided it wanted to save some of those memories, and they started doing oral histories. “We borrowed that history harvest model for work we did a couple of years ago with the IU community for the University’s bicentennial.”
But Craig and colleagues encountered many barriers in this work. “There were three that were especially concerning for us,” she said. “One was that platforms that make websites easy to build are easily hackable because of that technology,” Craig noted. “Those sites also require constant updating, and communities that have been excluded historically from archives often don’t have that kind of time or resources.”
Next, Craig and her fellow researchers needed a resource that could be used in a non-institutional context. “A lot of communities who want to do archival work don’t want to cooperate with institutions because they’ve had bad experiences,” explained Craig. “That trust factor is really hard to develop. We wanted the communities to be able to choose whether to partner with an institution or not.”
The third important aspect was long-term preservation, an offshoot of the first barrier of technology access and maintenance. “Complicated websites that are hard to preserve are also hard to build. So, we created our own platform that uses simple technology—you only need a smartphone. You can take photos with your smartphone, record histories with your smartphone, and also build a website with your smartphone.”
In addition, Craig and IDAH colleagues developed a human-relationship toolkit that was tested initially in Fall of 2023. The toolkit, which included instructions for how researchers, historians, and communities could come together and plan events that built trust in community preservation projects, shaped a personal experience for Craig. At her grandmother’s passing in 2022, Craig said, “My mother started putting together a family archive. We used the toolkit that IDAH developed at my grandmother’s memorial service to do interviews with family and take pictures. We had people add information to a website using this toolkit and it worked—we got to see it all happen.”
The Archiving Out of the Box project launches in December. To start, “We’ll identify communities, particularly communities that have a contemporary community improvement need, and also have these archival stories and community histories to tell,” said Craig.
“The grant will mostly fund community members, and will provide support for their equipment, event, and training needs,” noted Craig. Additional funding will cover the cost of workshops, including a grant development workshop.
“As a result of important work that we and others have done, we have effective models to preserve communities’ histories, and we want community members be able to choose the kinds of models they want to incorporate,” said Craig. “We can offer our expertise and guidance to them so that they can then go back to their communities and be the experts.”
