Keywords for Black Louisiana

About Keywords for Black Louisiana Stories

Contents: How Did We Get Here? | Values Statement | LA Colonial Docs | NHPRC | LifexCode

About Keywords for Black Louisiana

Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL) is a collective of researchers creating digital projects highlighting the Black life and culture of the Gulf Coast. With the support of funding from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, K4BL is building a community-engaged digital edition of annotated, transcribed and translated manuscript documents from 18th century (French and Spanish) Louisiana. Everywhere there was slavery, Black people resisted. The stories in these documents describe the lives and resistance of enslaved and free people of African descent against bondage, colonialism, and the everyday terror of slavery. Access to the stories of Black life in these documents has been limited to those trained in paleography or with French and/or Spanish translation skills. Providing access to the stories in these documents through English language translations and digital access does more than offer researchers, teachers, public historians, and artists opportunities to learn from the centuries-long Black freedom struggle Gulf Coast communities have been engaged in. It also creates a tremendous resource for African descended communities in Louisiana whose ancestors fueled some of the most important moments in American history.

K4BL centers African descended Gulf Coast communities and accountability to Black humanity at every level of the project, from the annual Black History Summer Workshop for Black public historians in Louisiana, to our collaborations with team members at Louisiana historically black colleges and universities, to our intergenerational and decentralized leadership structure, to our commitment to Black Digital Humanities (DH) principles.

We hope K4BL can provide a model for community-engaged digital recovery and preservation that will be remixed and reused by digital historians, computational humanists, data scientists, and digital humanities practitioners broadly who are looking for ethical and humane ways to center the needs of Black communities and institutions on the ground in the work of creating and curating digital materials.

How Did We Get Here?

Beginning in 2020 as part of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, and most recently through funding from a National Historic Publications and Records Commission grant, we have embarked on research in Gulf Coast Louisiana’s archive, seeking to expand our historical practice and learn from what eighteenth-century Gulf Coast Louisiana has to teach us.

In 2022, K4BL was awarded a NHPRC-Mellon Planning Grant for Collaborative Digital Editions. One of the goals of the planning period was to more accurately assess the pace of work and the capacity of the team as constituted to identify documents, create metadata, as well as initiate and complete transcriptions and translations. During the planning grant period K4BL, created over three hundred abstracts on Black life in the Gulf Coast, created over one hundred unique keywords, and begun drafting over seventy-five transcriptions/translations of French and Spanish documents into English. We built a team of undergraduates, graduates, faculty, librarians, and technicians from across institutions, including key collaborative relationships with Louisiana historically black colleges and universities undergraduates and faculty who have joined the project. Through quarterly workshops, we drafted editorial review practices and policies for the project. We established and refined research and review workflows, innovating workflows that moved at the pace of our intergenerational and cross-hierarchal team which, during COVID, often required us to slow down and evaluate how we do the work as much as what we are creating.

We refined our community engagement practices by adding a community team to the project structure with representatives from Xavier University in Louisiana, Dillard University, and Tulane University. With community team assistance, we hosted a very successful summer Black history in Louisiana workshop with fourteen Black public historians and added a spring meeting of Black public historians in response to community demand and suggestions from the community team. In doing so, K4BL connected with Black-owned catering and print media businesses as part of our community mandate. Knowing that aesthetics are a critical part of engaging with Black audiences and community, we contracted with the Black-owned design studio at The Black School who designed our aesthetic, logo, and print materials for the workshop (The Design Shop is run by Black high school intern/design apprentices from around the city). Participants have already reported using the sample documents provided at the first summer workshop in their tours, creative practice and in classrooms. With support from the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure, we hosted a Digital Dissertation Fellow who took the lead (assisted by our technical consultant, Dr. Alex Gil (Yale University) and Sheridan Libraries engineers) in building a prototype digital documentary edition on minimal computing principles. With implementation support, we will be able to continue this fellowship as a Digital Curation Fellowship and add a Community Engagement Fellowship. The addition of fellowships provides necessary and much desired professional development to graduate students seeking access to the digital humanities as a field and alternative academic skills-building.

In 2024, K4BL transitioned from a two year NHPRC-Mellon planning grant and was awarded an implementation level NHPRC Publications Grant. With the support of an implementation grant, K4BL is expanding this work with the goal of building out a collection of at least 1,800 abstracts of stories centering Black historical subjects, at least 200 unique keywords to describe Black life in the colonial archive, and at least 2000 transcribed/translated colonial document pages with accompanying manuscript document page images courtesy of the LCDDP.

The stories in these documents describe the lives and resistance of enslaved and free people of African descent against bondage, colonialism, and the everyday terror of slavery. Access to the stories of Black life in these documents has been limited to those trained in paleography with French and/or Spanish translation skills. Our hope is that by providing access to the stories in these documents through English-language translations, we can offer researchers, teachers, public historians, and artists access to the centuries-long freedom struggle Black communities have been engaged in.

Values Statement

K4BL centers African descended communities and accountability to Black humanity at every level of the project, from the annual Black History Summer Workshop for Black public historians in Louisiana, to our collaborations with team members at Louisiana’s historically black colleges and universities, to our intergenerational and decentralized leadership structure. Guided by Black digital humanities principles, K4BL provides a model for community-engaged digital recovery and preservation that can be remixed and reused by digital historians, computational humanists, data scientists, and digital humanities practitioners broadly who are looking for ethical and humane ways to center the needs of Black communities and institutions on the ground in the work of creation and curation.

We align ourselves with the definition of “descended communities” developed by the The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and James Madison’s Montpelier:

“A descendant community can include those whose ancestors were enslaved not only at a particular site, but also throughout the surrounding region, reflecting the fact that family ties often crossed plantation boundaries. A descendant community can also welcome those who feel connected to the work the institution is doing, whether or not they know of a genealogical connection.”

We define “Black” at its most capacious as broadly of African descent, without limits on ethnicity or place of origin.

For more on centering Black communities and knowledge in the digital humanities, see Abdul Alkhalimat. “The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital,” in The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021); Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 42–50; Marisa Parham “Sample, Signal, Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Catherine Knight Steele, Kevin C. Winstead, and Jessica H. Lu, “I Don’t Love DH; I Love Black Folks: Building Black DH Programming,” in Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (New York: Routledge, 2023); Bergis Jules et al., “Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models for Community-Based Archives,” February 2019

Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project

Target documents are currently housed at the Louisiana Historical Center (LHC) and maintained by the New Orleans Jazz Museum, one of our institutional partners. As described on their website, “The Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project’s digitization and online publication of the LHC’s Colonial Documents Collection will exponentially increase access to a rich archive for researchers of every stripe, from high school students to amateur genealogists to academic historians. This twenty-first-century high-tech undertaking marks the most recent phase of a series of efforts stretching back more than a hundred years to make it easier for researchers to navigate this enormous collection of criminal and civil court cases, commercial transactions, successions, wills, and other legal documents dating back to 1714. Global access to these 220,000 pages, handwritten in French and Spanish, will open up these archives as never before to those who study Louisiana and its inhabitants.”

Visit the website here.

Through the Louisiana Colonial Document Digitization Project (LCDDP), approximately 200,000 pages of colonial documents (created between 1714 and through 1803) have been digitized by the Jazz Museum and catalogued with descriptive metadata, including subject headings. These documents represent at least one hundred genres of archival material including court cases, bills of sale, birth and death notices, manumissions, labor contracts, passports and shipping documentation, promissory notes, and medical examinations.

The LHC holds the majority of Louisiana’s eighteenth-century documents, however only approximately 3/5ths of them are at the Louisiana Historical Center. Another 2/5ths (some 110 to 120,000 documents) of the colonial documents are held by the New Orleans Notarial Archives. A smaller, undefined number are held at the New Orleans Public Library. For more on the spread of documentation on French and Spanish-occupied Louisiana, see “Housing the Louisiana Archive” a StoryMap created by Olivia Barnard, Associate French Editor and Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University. See also Howard Margot, “Historical Peregrinations of New Orleans’s French Superior Council and Spanish Judicial Records,” Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 11, no. 3 (June 2015): 171–84.

We are grateful to the LCDDP for permitting widespread use of their database and allowing us to provide page images of manuscript sources on our document and story sites.

NHPRC

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a statutory body affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources, created in every medium ranging from quill pen to computer, relating to the history of the United States.

The NHPRC:

• was established by Congress in 1934
• is a 15-member body
• is chaired by the Archivist of the United States
• is composed of representatives of the three branches of the Federal Government
• is composed of professional associations of archivists, historians, documentary editors, and records administrators

NHPRC administrative staff at the National Archives in Washington, DC:

• implements its policies and recommendations
• advises NHPRC on proposals
• provides advice and assistance to potential applicants and grantees

LifexCode

LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure offers a grammar of refusal and a language of freedom for the (digital) humanities. Founded in 2020, by Drs. Jessica Marie Johnson and Christina Thomas, LifexCode is an ecosystem of labs, projects, community partners, and members exploring, creating, and centering antiracist and decolonial digital humanities practices.

Learn more lifexcode.org.