Intellectual Statement

Digital humanities provides an intellectual home for my interdisciplinary work on archives, digital memory practices, and social movements. As an archivist and oral historian, I practiced DH before I knew what it was. In graduate studies for my MLIS and subsequent work in archives, I worked on digital collection development, metadata, and preservation. As a PhD candidate Information Studies pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities, I have taken coursework and participated in research that has given me a strong grounding in DH’s theoretical and methodological approaches.

My engagement with DH thus far can be placed in two overlapping categories: the use of DH methods to conduct research; and the critical examination of digital archives. An example of my work in the first category is research with the BioCritical Studies Lab on in-custody deaths in Maryland jails. I created visualizations of this data that were used by the Lab and partner community organizations to generate policy recommendations. Some of these visualizations were published in a report that our partners in Maryland used as an advocacy tool. In other research, I used theoretical frameworks from DH to critically examine digital archives. For example, working with the UCLA Community Archives Lab, I collaborated on a project called “Virtual Belonging: Assessing the Affective Impact of Digital Records Creation in Community Archives.” This project examined community archives’ use of technologies like Zoom to create records. In a co-authored publication currently in production, we assessed the affordances and limitations of these technologies in creating safe environments for marginalized people to share their oral history with an archive.

In my dissertation I bring together these realms of DH research, by using DH methods to examine digital archives that collect material from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. My dissertation studies archival collections related to incarceration, with a focus on how communities use these archives to imagine and organize toward post-carceral futures. Much of this work takes place online, and two of the three archives in my study are primarily digital archives. An approach grounded in DH provides me with a theoretical framework for critically examine these digital archives. I have also used DH methods such as mapping, network visualization, and text analysis to situate the archives within an ecosystem of digital memory work on incarceration. I plan to continue using these methods as the project develops, and to publish a digital version of my findings in an accessible format to share with community research partners.

My research highlights what Maria Cotera calls “the radical potential” of DH, and particularly how it is manifested by community archives. In my dissertation, I highlight how those targeted by incarceration and other forms of state violence use digital archives as spaces for politicized grief, healing, and radical activism. By studying these as DH projects, I aim to disrupt epistemological hierarchies that segregate academic knowledge production from grassroots knowledge production. I argue that community digital archival praxis, which emerges from lived experiences of marginalization and violence, offer an ethic for DH projects that is grounded in care, transformation, and world-building.