ACLS hosted 22 digital humanities scholars, librarians, and archivists from August 6-9, 2024, for workshops alongside the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) at George Mason University in Arlington, VA.
The participants in the ACLS convening included Digital Justice Grantees, Digital Extension Grantees, and members of the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship. They represented a variety of colleges, universities, and institutions from across the country, including Howard University, Lorain Community College, the Smithsonian Institution Data Science Lab, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.
ACLS has a long history of supporting digital research projects in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, including ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships (2006-2015), ACLS Digital Extension Grants (2016-2021), and the current ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program.
The ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative 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. The program, supported by the Mellon Foundation, is designed to provide resources for projects that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, engage in appropriately scaled capacity building efforts, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.
The ACLS working sessions provided an opportunity for participants to build community and engage with others involved in the digital humanities ecosystem. The working sessions focused on areas of precarity in this growing field, and how ACLS might better support digital humanities through our grant and fellowship programming. Common challenges that emerged include:
“Along with focus groups ACLS held in early summer, these working sessions offered invaluable insight on the various forms of precarity digital humanities scholars and practitioners navigate as they pursue their work,” said Keyanah Nurse, ACLS Senior Program Officer for Intentional Design for an Equitable Academy (IDEA) Programs. “Receiving such feedback is at the center of IDEA’s method of intentional inclusive design. By actively engaging our primary constituencies throughout the design process, we continue to refine the Digital Justice Grants program so that it further aligns with its redistributive and reparative aims.”
Additionally, Nurse moderated a panel with grantees at the ADHO 2024 conference titled “Digital Justice as Disaster Recovery.” The panel explored the multifaceted relationship between digital justice and disaster recovery within various geographic areas across the Global North and South, particularly how the use of digital tools and methods can combat the erasure of ecological, political, and social disasters and their subsequent recovery efforts. The panel featured three project teams across the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program and Digital Extension Program:
Speaking into Silences: Building Community Archives across the Puerto Rican Archipelago (2022 Digital Justice Development Grant)
“Let’s get to the stage in which we’re using digital humanities to create public facing outputs for different audiences, and those audiences have to start with our community,” said Ricia Chansky G’22. “We can’t recreate extractive models that say, ‘We at the university know what’s best to do with your stories.’ We don’t know what’s best to do with somebody else’s stories. We have to maintain stories in communities in the way in which our communities want them.”
Ticha: Advancing Community-Engaged Digital Scholarship (2019 Digital Extension Grant)
The Ticha team’s work considers address and repair through the digital aspect of our work. The Ticha side—the digital output that we’re talking about—might be the only place where Zapotecs ever see a document written by our ancestors. These 500 years of texts are now available to the community.
The Personal Writes the Political: Rendering Black Lives Legible Through the Application of Machine Learning to Anti-Apartheid Solidarity Letters (2022 Digital Justice Seed Grant, 2024 Digital Justice Development Grant)
“The urgency in South Africa is most acutely felt because the generation who has lived experience of apartheid, especially the folks who were politically active in the sixties and seventies, a lot of them are passing on,” said Stephen David G’22, G’24. “A new generation called the ‘Born frees’ are folks who are born after 1994, who have no living memory of apartheid, are entering this precarious post-apartheid condition without many connections to the archive.”
The next round of applications for the ACLS Digital Justice Grant Program will open on September 10, 2024, with applications due December 3, 2024, 9:00 PM EST.
