Black Wealth Open Access Timeline & Toolkit
Savannah Price
Undergraduate Researcher
History Major (College of Arts & Sciences)
Willa Liburd Tavernier
Faculty Mentor
Willa Liburd Tavernier (Libraries)
Project Description
“The Black Wealth Open Access timeline and toolkit project, covering the period 1820-2020, pulls together historical sources and scholarly work on black land ownership and wealth accumulation, paying attention to the intersection between this acquisition and the dispossession and removal of the native inhabitants of the land now known as the United States. We aim to make this work widely accessible. It will not be comprehensive but is meant to highlight representative events in a given time period. The timeline will feature 3 logics - Financial, Migration, and Dispossession - to explore how the system of power has affected the ability of African-Americans to produce and maintain wealth through acquiring land, while actively promoting the ability of the dominant community to hoard wealth and economic opportunity. We will be using TimelineJS and Omeka to build the timeline, with a planned launch date of February 2022, after which we will focus on the toolkit. The toolkit will aim to provide teaching resources that use the timeline. We actively focus on using open access scholarly and publicly accessible research sources wherever possible, so that the underlying research material can be accessed by anyone. The timeline and toolkit will be open and licensed under the most expansive creative commons license CC-BY to promote both access and re-use. This is critical because the collective development of knowledge depends on being able to access, use and critique existing knowledge.
Technology or Computational Component
We will be using TimelineJS and Omeka to build the timeline, with a planned launch date of February 2022, after which we will focus on the toolkit. The toolkit will aim to provide teaching resources that use the timeline. Student assistants will: -Gain familiarity with primary sources and secondary sources for research -Learn how to translate scholarly work into material that will be understandable by a wider audience -Gain familiarity with digital humanities -Learn how to create a digital timeline -Learn how to create a digital collection