Higher Education and Communities Outside the Gates

Creative humanists have set out on their own to use digital methodologies to probe stories outside the canon of existing institutional collections. Their projects are models for democratizing knowledge through digital collection development and public dissemination. Yet digital archives and historically inclined digital projects are not only democratizing access to historical materials, they are also calling into question traditional archives as institutions and sites of power. The effects of archival power are profound and can result in the systemic erasure of marginalized communities, which archival scholars describe as … “symbolic annihilation.”

Institutional capacity to archive ephemeral digital history has been slow to keep pace. Documenting the Now, as described in its website,” is a tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.” As Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Vernon Mitchell Jr. write, the project began in the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. Social media, and Twitter in particular, where most of the information about Ferguson was shared, was a vital avenue for disseminating information about the case, the social activism it spurred, and the opposition to the protests that followed. The Twitter digital content from the Ferguson protests, for example, represented an authentic depiction of the significance of the events, the activity surrounding them, the diversity of the actors, and the nature of the protests’ support and opposition. The level of participation in these movements as they play out on social media makes them rich scholarly resources deserving of collection, preservation, and study. [10]

The Digital Transgender Archive and Documenting the Now are but two examples of dozens of valuable collections being constructed and cared for outside of institutional systems. In Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice, Roopika Risam notes the need for local focus in digital humanities efforts:

Emphasis on the local—a directive of postcolonial studies—demands acknowledgment that there is not a single world view or way of being within the world but rather a proliferation of worlds, traditions, and forms of knowledge. These multiplicities only constitute a global dimension insofar as the global is itself diverse and only understood through local particularities. [11]

Risam describes a range of projects that, “in their design and content, use digital cultural heritage, games, performance art, and mapping in service of decolonization for Indigenous communities, immigrant histories, and the landscape of digital humanities itself.” The boundaries between the once-distinct functions of library and archival collection building, university publishing, and the relationship between the university and its community blur as long-standing social and institutional structures are torqued. Entrepreneurial scholars, along with a wide range of communities and cultural heritage groups build collections, devise policies about ethical engagement, and are changing the humanities.

Often, discussions of communities in relation to digital humanities scholarship—as in the rhetoric of “community-university partnership” or “community-based research” or even “community archives”—are implicitly referencing a well-worn dichotomy between academic or cultural institutions on the one hand and public groups that exist outside of and independently of those institutions on the other hand. Yet growth, maintenance, and impact of humanistic knowledge and culture have always been driven by communities—groups of people gathered around varying nuclei, such as shared dimensions of identity or memory, place, belief system, interests, objectives, methods, and more. The dichotomy between the institutionally housed efforts, with all of their varieties of support, and the work of documenting in communities that have not had an established place in the system masks a diversified and complex landscape of communities, groups, and teams—collectives defined around human relationships—that determine how cultural knowledge is socially constructed, shared, advanced, and maintained over time. At the same time, many of the projects that vividly exemplify this Commission’s mandate call into question the asymmetry in power that institutional affiliation and support require. In light of the power disparities, legacies of damage, and inevitable concessions involved in partnering with institutions, holders of knowledge within and outside of the academy have created new humanities that confront the settler and predominantly white institutions that have dominated academic and cultural spaces.

The Commission considered the growing body of work on equitable and sustainable models of community knowledge production along with community-centered approaches to the infrastructures and sustainability of digital scholarship. Community-centered approaches to infrastructure foreground the social dimensions of communities and human networks. Community-centered approaches to sustainability view the preservation of digital artifacts and infrastructures in the context of how digital projects sustain communities and how projects endure and evolve as living, vital, community-owned and-controlled resources. All of these issues highlight the need to rethink institutional roles, practices, and values in relation to community knowledge creation. Forward-looking communities at work on historical and cultural documentation are thriving outside the university and have a limited foothold inside of it. Rebalancing and opening the relationship between higher education and communities is a cornerstone of how knowledge will continue to be created and shared.

The abundance and richness of community archiving projects illustrate the extent and variety of knowledge being created and shared outside of institutions. They also illustrate the many ways that relationships between institutions and communities creating new knowledge can be fraught with mistrust, misunderstandings, and, as further described in the Infrastructures section, divergent values. Focus group participants described wrestling with a range of challenges.

Charles Johnson, Associate Professor and Director of Public History, North Carolina Central University:

We’re trying to preserve that history [of slave labor camps] from erasure as that community is gentrified but also to make it more widely known to the community at large. … There’s always a conversation around where those oral histories will ultimately live and access to them … One of the ways that I was able to do that was through empowering the community by allowing them to or helping them to create their own informed consent and deed of gift form such that I actually go to them to get permission to make use of their oral histories.

Joshua Burford, Co-Founder, Invisible Histories:

We’ve been collecting in Alabama since 2018. With the help of the Mellon Foundation, we expanded into three additional states. We have over 160 collections of history in Alabama, about 50 or so in Mississippi. The oldest thing in our collection is from 1912. The youngest thing in our collection is from about three weeks ago. And we just uncovered some materials from the 1880s with the help of a community-based researcher who is just this cool dude who is out looking for stuff for us all over the place.

Kayla Jackson, Head Archivist, Hallie Q. Brown Community Center, housed inside of a community center in St. Paul, Minnesota, describes the tension of working with universities:

There’s a lot of condescension that comes [from] predominantly white or just well-funded institutions; they meet me and they think I’m just a person who’s a really big fan of community archives and I just got into it. It’s like, no, I’m classically trained in this. You don’t need to tell me what provenance is. I know what that is.

Virginia Steel, Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian, UCLA:

I do see that as a big gap in universities and something that I think needs to be talked about and addressed as I think, at least in public universities, we’re all talking about engagement with our communities. So, how do we incentivize that, prioritize it and recognize it when something great happens?

Even content already in institutional collections may need to be recontextualized and presented differently. In one of our focus groups, University of Michigan School of Information professor Ricardo Punzalan reflected on the work that goes into reparative cataloging:

I’ve done this consultation with the community and we said, what should we be doing? And then they ask us, “What do you have?” And then we said, well, we haven’t really done an extensive inventory of all Philippine items. It’s very hard to go in front of the community and ask what do you need from us? If you yourself do not know ... the extent of the materials you have. … If you have hundreds or thousands of finding aids to fix, it’s almost impossible, right? … To implement some of the reparative description work that we do, you need to know how to work with data, and that’s data curation or digital curation. And that’s a whole lot of technical skills that you need to do.

Punzalan reminds us that the work of restructuring the humanities so that they will be relevant to the society and students of today and tomorrow begins with a fundamental renegotiation of the relationship between academic institutions and multifaceted communities.

Interactions between institutions and community knowledge owners and creators are complicated at every level, from values to operations. Seemingly small requirements, such as requiring Social Security numbers for low-value payments, can be obstacles.

Justin Schell, Director, Creative Spaces and Learning Technologies, University of Michigan Library:

We’ve gone back and forth with University finance departments around incentives for community members who participate in University programs and they’re like, “oh, we’re going to send them gift cards.” No one wants a gift card. That’s not the thing that they want, but that’s the only thing we can give. Can we think a little bit differently about this? … There are these hard and fast things that seem immovable, till they’re not.

Katrina M. Powell, Professor of English, Director of Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies, Virginia Tech:

In the academy, we’re generally moving toward open access for a variety of good reasons. However, in our work with one tribal community for a particular funding agency, in writing the proposal, there was a statement that everything would become open access. And the tribal leaders were very concerned about that. They wanted the option to keep their artifacts private if they decided to have an intranet experience for tribal members. And so in the end … we didn’t submit the grant because our partners were uncomfortable with the requirement for open access and the agency was not willing to change the requirement.

Francena Turner, CLIR Fellow/Postdoctoral Associate for Data Curation in African American History and Culture, University of Maryland at College Park:

Cities might have a fraught relationship with the university, like the Lakeland community, which is right up on the institution, where there’s an oral history project and some good work coming from that … And there’s a lot of work to be done to build; it’s not a restoration process. There was not a good relationship in the beginning. … But when it comes to the project that I work on, I’m the constant because I’m a little bit of a one man show with the physical work of getting the interviews done.

Relationships between institutions and the communities in which they are situated range widely. Some, like community colleges or institutions like Rutgers-Newark, strive to be an anchor institution within their community; they understand lessons of integration, two-way streets, and mutual respect. As commissioner Jewon Woo has observed, her community college students are in and of the community; the borders between the institution and the community are porous. But in larger or private institutions, this level of integration and interaction is not typically the case. We are not able to understand how 21st-century humanities work is happening in higher education without an overall understanding of the sector. How do the humanities—and the digital humanities—fit into different types of US colleges and universities? How is work that focuses on excluded communities or issues of social justice accomplished in different environments? Since almost all of the funding for this work originates in college and university budgets, familiarity with the complex tapestry of US institutions of higher learning is core to understanding how to enable digital scholarship in racial and social justice to thrive.