Public Humanities & Community Engagement, Milken Massacre, and Residual Violence Webinar (11/4/2023)

The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) - part of the University of Kansas's History of Black Writing project (HBW) - is a digital archive of over 7,000 Black-authored texts. It launched in 2010 and has received funding from KU, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. PhiloLogic, a searchable online metadata platform from the Textual Optics Lab at the University of Chicago, powers BBIP's HBW Novel Corpus.
HBW and the Detroit Public Library partnered together to offer this webinar on "Public Humanities and Community Engagement." Presenters Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha Taylor highlight the Millican massacre project, which, through community and student participation, has documented the 1868 massacre of freed peoples in central Texas, probably the largest massacre in Reconstruction Texas. They discuss how communities might work with universities and colleges to not only document such events of racial violence, but also to enact contemporary instances of restitution. Focusing on the Detroit Public Library Special Collections and other open source digital materials, they will suggest ways that communities might begin their own public humanities projects.
Amy E. Earhart is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty of Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. Earhart has participated in grants and fellowships received from the NEH, ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation, and won numerous teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Achievement Award from The Association of Former Students and Texas A&M University. Earhart has published scholarship on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes a monograph "Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies" (U Michigan Press 2015), a co-edited collection "The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age" (U Michigan Press 2010), and a number other of articles and book chapters. Her current book, “A Compromised Infrastructure: Digital Humanities, African American Literary History and Technologies of Identity,” is under advance contract with Stanford University Press.
Toniesha L. Taylor is the Department Chair and an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Texas Southern University. She received her PhD in Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research focus is in African American, Religion, Intercultural, Gender, and Digital Humanities. Her research and conference presentations include discussions on womanist rhetoric as method and theory; practical social justice pedagogy for faculty and students; and digital humanities methods implications for activist recovery projects. Her publications include “Saving Sound, Sounding Black and Voicing America: John Lomax and the Creation of the “American Voice” in Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, and a co-authored essay with Amy E. Earhart titled “Pedagogies of Race: Digital Humanities in the Age of Ferguson” in Debates in Digital Humanities. Taylor is an affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU and a National Teaching partner for the Colored Conventions Project.
The Millican Project Website: millican.omeka...
This is a recording of an event that took place on Saturday, November 4, 2023 at 11:00 a.m.