For my digital public history project, I’ve chosen to build a platform that brings members of the Black historian community together to engage with one another about how history continues to shape contemporary issues in the United States and abroad. This project, temporarily dubbed the Black Historian Network, will use Omeka as a public discourse forum and a means to facilitate engagement with primary sources. Although I was aware that this would be my project’s direction, it was tricky to narrow down how to execute this idea in a way that is grounded in historical scholarship. Ultimately, I chose a singular topic that my personas would be interested in. Through this topic, I hope to create a platform prototype that will demonstrate how users can browse contemporary issues affecting the Black community and the lives of marginalized people in the United States.
This subsect of my project will focus on the sexual violence perpetrated against Black women in the antebellum South. Building upon this matter, I will examine the rationale used to justify such violence and how these justifications are reflected in the violence inflicted upon Black women in contemporary contexts. Furthermore, I will analyze how these justifications persist through accusations of hypersexuality. Alongside historical scholarship, the work will be primarily grounded in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Wilma King’s “Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things”: The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom. Additionally, I hope to include excerpts from enslaved people’s narratives. This examination will consider more contemporary works to ponder how Black women are treated today.
The intended audience for this platform comprises individuals across the Black diaspora who are scholars or have a scholarly interest in history. This includes Black undergraduate students with a focus on history. The platform’s dissemination strategy aims to reach and be distributed through Black historians and professionals specializing in Black history. The primary features of this platform will include a discussion forum, a panel showing recent comments on essays, and the main interface that displays the most popular papers/threads at that time. The “recents” window will be minimizable, allowing users to tailor the interface to their needs. There will be a top bar with a drop-down menu that allows users to browse specific time periods to ease research. The networking function will ideally work similarly to LinkedIn, allowing connections with other historians. Users will be able to upload audiovisual materials and papers to start threads that use scholarly materials to initiate a community discussion.
In a way, my “project” is a fraction of the major digital public history project that is the Black Historian Network platform. This platform was inspired by the Black Oral Historian network. Although this community meets monthly via Zoom to discuss oral history and share opportunities, it also offers oral historians the chance to cultivate a community uniquely their own. The creation of this platform prototype will surely be a difficult endeavor; however, it likewise represents an opportunity to unite Black historians through a digital community.
