Black Digital Ecosystems
In alignment with the project principles outlined by the Colored Conventions Project and the Center for Black Digital Research, Dr. Foreman affirms that the collective work she does is created in the spirt of solidarity with other digital projects and scholarly work with shared values and missions.
She is therefore committed to supporting and amplifying sibling projects within the Black Digital Ecosystem and invites you to explore and connect with the many impactful projects highlighted below.
The African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative
The AADHum Initiative brings African American studies and digital humanities together in order to support scholars and expand upon both fields, making the digital humanities more inclusive of African American history and culture and enriching African American studies research with digital methods, archives, and tools.
The Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL)
The Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL) is a multi-institutional Black feminist partnership that supports solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies conducted by undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members, and community partners who are committed to transformative justice and accountable to communities beyond the Western academy.
Freedom on the Move
Freedom on the Move is a database of fugitives from North American slavery. The database compiles thousands of “runaway slave advertisements” that are searchable within the database. A research aid, a pedagogical tool, and a resource for genealogists, the database is being used by scholars, students, and citizen historians in new and creative ways.
Life x Code: DH Against Enclosure
A grammar of refusal and a language of freedom for the [digital] humanities
Life x Code incubates community accountable, decolonial, antiracist projects and praxis. “We wish to be co-conspirators with Harriet Jacobs, Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, and all Black feminist scholars in search of their own loophole of retreat …. We offer an invitation to draw new lines over, under, and through to claim new relations.”
Black Bibliography Project
The Black Bibliography Project aims to build an electronic database whose information sources and data design challenge the traditional conventions of bibliography by incorporating the values that the African American artistic, scholarly, and curatorial communities have long brought to the practice of making and preserving black texts.
Civil Rights and Restorative Justice
The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project assesses and supports policy measures to redress the ongoing harms decades after the racial terror of the Deep South.
The CRRJ at Northeastern University School of Law is a mission-driven program of interdisciplinary teaching, research and policy analysis on race, history, and criminal justice. Offering courses, fellowships, and an archive of cases, the program is the preeminent academic center for the study of historical redress in the US.
Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery
Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery aims to identify, digitize, transcribe, and publish ads placed in newspapers across the United States (and beyond) by formerly enslaved people searching for family members and loved ones after emancipation. The project now includes over 3,500 ads spanning eight decades from 275 newspapers.
In addition to publishing these ads, making them available to genealogists and researchers alike, Last Seen includes lesson plans and resources for teachers to use in their classrooms (at all grade levels) to help teach the hard history of slavery.
Black Press Research Collective (BPRC)
The Black Press Research Collective is dedicated to curating and producing knowledge about the historical and contemporary role of Black newspapers in the United States, African Diaspora and Africa.
It generates digital scholarship and archives the Black Press to preserve the significance of the historical and contemporary role of Black newspapers in Africa and the African Diasporas.
COVID Black
COVID Black started in April 2020 with a call to faculty in colleges and universities to demand that their local and state public health departments collect and publish racial data on the coronavirus pandemic. Since that time, COVID Black has evolved into an organization that recognizes the power of health data and information combined with critical and justice-oriented theoretical frameworks of Black Studies, Black Digital Humanities, Public Humanities, Health Humanities, and Public Health to tell empowering stories about Black life that address racial health disparities.
The US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH)
The US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Center serves as a venue for scholarship focused on the US Latino written legacy that has been lost, absent, repressed or underrepresented. The USLDH Center provides a physical space for the development, support and training in digital humanities projects using a vast collection of newspapers, photographs and digital materials; creates opportunities and facilities for digital publication of Latino-based projects and scholarship; promotes and fosters interdisciplinary scholarly work; provides a communal virtual space to share knowledge and projects related to Latino digital humanities; and establishes a Latino digital humanities hub.
Douglass Day
Douglass Day is a collective action for Black history, featuring a different collection of Black history each year.
“Douglass Day is an annual program that marks the birth of Frederick Douglass. Each year, we gather thousands of people to help create new & freely available resources for learning about Black history. We frequently focus on important Black women’s archives, such as Anna Julia Cooper (2020), Mary Church Terrell (2021), and plenty more to come in future years.”