Keywords for Black Louisiana Wins NHPRC Grant
The proposed collaboration will plan for and develop a digital edition of French and Spanish colonial records (1714-1803) documenting enslaved and free people of African descent in Louisiana
The Keywords for Black Louisiana Colonial Team has been awarded a National Historic Publications and Records Commission Start-Up Grant for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History.
The full press release is here https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2022/nr22-12
The full list of awards is here: https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/awards/awards-11-21
The core Colonial Team consists of: Emma Bilski (Lead Chair), Ellie Palazzolo (Digital Chair), Leila Blackbird (Ethics Chair), Olivia Barnard, and Jessica Marie Johnson. This fall semester that team was joined by a secondary team led by Dr. Guadalupe Garcia and students at Tulane University. Research team members also include Sophie White (University of Notre Dame), Jean Hébrard (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and Christine Villarreal (University of Texas at El Paso), as well as Rosanne Adderley (Tulane University, and Emily Clark (Tulane University). Partners include Sayeed Choudhury (Sheridan Libraries, JHU), Karen Leathem (Louisiana State Museum), Howard Margot (Historic New Orleans Collection), Greg Lambousy (New Orleans Jazz Museum).
Description of the grant:
$120,000 to support planning for Kinship and Longing: Keywords for Black Louisiana. The proposed collaboration involves scholars and graduate students based at Johns Hopkins, Tulane, Notre Dame, and the University of Texas-El Paso to plan for and develop a digital edition based on some 200,000 French and Spanish colonial records (1714-1803) documenting enslaved and free people of African descent in Louisiana. The planning team seeks to build a selective, open source, searchable edition, including some 50,000 transcribed and translated documents and another 100,000 abstracts to provide a better understanding of the collection and make it available to scholars, genealogists, students, and the general public. (PL-103381)
As a planning grant, the project begins with the Colonial Team, while we plan for subsequent editions incorporating the work of the other two Keywords for Black Louisiana teams (Marronage, led by Halle Ashby and Researching Black New Orleans, led by Olivia Barnard).
Keywords for Black Louisiana is creating digital portals into the study of and experience of Black life in Louisiana. Keywords is a LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure project. Learn more at https://www.lifexcode.org/
Congratulations to Keywords!!
