The Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA) is “a site dedicated to highlighting the various movements, locations, art, and rhetoric of Black figures and coalitions that shaped Boston’s history, and thusly, its present.” Developed by a team of researchers at Northeastern University, with connections to the Department of English, the Department of History, the Africana Studies Program, as well as the NULab for Humanities and Computational Social Science and the Digital Scholarship Group in Snell Library, the project offers multiple exhibits and collections along with teaching materials: curriculum, student work, and resources.
Highlights of the site include exhibits dedicated to Places & Maps, Important Figures, Literature and the Arts, Black Citizenship & Service, the Black Press, Social Movements & Spiritualities, Contemporary Connections, and Texts. Each exhibit includes curated digital collections with accompanying bibliographies. Of particular note is the team’s discussion of their methodology and principles of care which models ethical and consensual digital humanities work.
The team also welcomes proposals for new exhibits, making it an ideal example of community-engaged digital humanities work.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Kayla Abner, Emily Cukier, Rachel Hogan, Mariam Ismail, Anna E Kijas, Jill Krefft, Frances Jane Sleger (Editors-at-Large), Pamella Lach and Hillary Richardson (Editors for the week), Ruth Carpenter, Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Molly McGuire, Christine Salek, and Rachel Starry (dh+lib Review Editors), and Tom Lee (Technical Editor).