Love Data Week '25 Research Talk: Data Stewardship and Black DH: Researching and Building K4BL

Description

Olivia Barnard, Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil, Akosa Obianwu, Ellie Palazzolo, and Nadejda I. Webb will present a research talk on "Data Stewardship and Black DH: Researching and Building K4BL [Keywords for Black Louisiana]" as part of Love Data Week 2025.

Keywords for Black Louisiana is a pair of websites (<docs.k4bl.org> and <stories.k4bl.org>) curating a digital edition of transcriptions, translations, and stories about people of African descent in Louisiana based on French and Spanish colonial documents in the 18th and early long-19th centuries. It is a LifexCode project sponsored by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission and Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries. For the past four years, Keywords researchers have engaged manuscripts digitized through the Louisiana Historical Center's Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project and housed in the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Thanks to robust, ongoing community engagement, our project serves as a resource for researchers, cultural workers, genealogists, educators, and students. We hold ourselves accountable to a primary audience of Black New Orleans: community members, descendants, creators, and scholars. This talk will address our data development and curation process, writing and publishing documents and stories on our site, and community engagement and accountability in digital humanities.

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