The Digital Humanities Exchange organized an event to talk about what their mission is and who they are on Wednesday, October 13, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. Three members of the Black Digital Research Center (CBDR) Samantha De Vera, Denise Burgher and Sabrina Evans spoke about their different roles, with Deanna Semark, a member of the Digital Humanities Exchange, and Tatiana Bryant, a librarian for African American Studies at the UCI, mainly host of the event.
Semark began the meeting by honoring and recognizing first the ancestral and unseated territories of the Tanga peoples.
De Vera focuses on the experiences of black refugees during the Civil War. He began the conversation by talking about the first exhibitions of the Color Conventions Project, which documents a series of political gatherings that began in the 19th century, and talked about conventional evolution over the years.
“They talk about the racial upbringing or education of black men, as well as how to devise strategies toward political, civil, and human rights,” De Vera explained.
Burgher has a PhD in English. candidate at the University of Delaware who recently completed a one-year residency scholarship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. He focused on and explained the values and ethics that the project has been acquiring since its inception.
Burgher explained how crucial it is to organize the work of the Digital Humanities Exchange around its principles and its importance to its success. She believes that the principles of the project are the basis of their relationships, their partnerships, the production of their work and their program as a collective. His discussion also highlighted the importance of Frederick Douglass’s contribution to the black movement.
“Why is it so critical, especially right now? [ Douglass] he invited us to critique the constitution, “Burgher said.” Not to see it as a frozen or fixed document, but to be a living document that is meant to evolve and change over time. ”
Evans is the coordinator of the project for the organizational archive of a black woman with a doctorate in English and African American studies. candidate. She presented and discussed the center’s new projects through the archive she coordinated of 19th-century black women’s organizers.
“All the deeply racialized and gendered dismissals of the collective and collaborative work that these black intellectual activists pioneered through the organizational archive of black women,” Evans said. “We seek to bring together the scattered archives of organizational works by black women from the various stories of individual figures.”
Towards the end, there was a part of questions where they went into more detail about the CBDR. The conversation ended with Ella Turenne, one of the hosts, thanking the three speakers for their work and wisdom. Overall, the CDR’s contributions to the community include raising awareness of historical leaders and movements that have never received recognition.
Felwa Al-Rasheed is a Campus News Fellow for the fall quarter of 2021. She can be contacted at fsalrash@uci.edu.
