Editors’ Note

Roopika Risam and Jennifer Guiliano

As we swiftly approach the end of the Reviews in Digital Humanities summer break, we’re thrilled to share the August issue of the journal. Over the past year, we’ve been working with our topic editors to develop issues that reflect the social justice-driven focus of Reviews. In January, we published the first of our topic editors’ issues: an excellent bilingual (Spanish/English) issue on Latinx oral histories.

This month, we are pleased to bring you an issue from our community-engaged digital humanities team. The issue, which focuses on community-engaged mapping, was edited by Jamila Moore Pewu, Scherly Virgill, and Bruno Buccalon. We’re grateful to Jamila, Scherly, and Bruno for a fantastic issue that showcases global mapping initiatives on topics as diverse as racial inequities in California’s Inland Empire, infrastructural inequities in Brazil’s favelas, representing Native nations’ territories, and historical change in Rio de Janeiro.

Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Want us to review your project? Contact the editors, Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam, by email or through the Twitter hashtag #ReviewsInDH.  

Topic Editors’ Note

Jamila Moore Pewu and Scherly Virgill

As digital humanists with backgrounds in African diasporic oral and digital public history, community-engaged practices such as conscious collaboration and critical listening inform nearly every aspect of our work. However, we fully acknowledge that while these practices and the principles that underlie them are important, they are not innate to academia nor automatic byproducts of doing public-facing digital humanities work. Thus, community-engaged digital humanities must do more than make projects available to wider audiences via digital tools and platforms. As a field, it must emphasize radical co-creation of and approaches to knowledge dissemination — and even disruption — that are inherently community-driven.

Our goal for our topic — community-engaged digital humanities — is to expand on the groundwork laid by publications like Rebecca S. Wingo, Jason Heppler, and Paul Schadewald’s Digital Community Engagement, which defines “community engagement” as mutually accountable academic partnerships with communities, emphasizing reciprocity over extraction. In line with this, we seek to highlight digital humanities projects and initiatives that are inspired by and imagined alongside communities, while at the same time giving space and equal attention to projects that are created by and for communities themselves. We believe that centering community-led digital humanities projects not only magnifies local stories and landscapes but also provides valuable insights that might otherwise be missed by academic institutions and conventional digital humanities funding initiatives.

To facilitate deeper theoretical and methodological conversations on the contributions of community-engaged practices to digital humanities fields, we prioritize a set of questions and considerations that help center the lived experiences and needs of the communities involved. These include:

• How does a project address and integrate local knowledge and cultural contexts?

• Who are the communities impacted by a project — racially, ethnically, geographically, etc.?

• What processes are in place or being developed to ensure a community feedback loop, to collect and integrate feedback from the community?

By explicitly calling attention to these points in each review, we aim to generate a collection of best practices and innovative approaches that can serve as models for future project teams.

Our debut topic issue features projects that engage critical cartographic practice in the digital age, demonstrating how digital mapping can help change or reimagine local and global histories, communities, disciplines, and more. They also invite us to consider how digital maps created by and with local communities can empower residents to take active roles in crafting and safeguarding their collective narratives. By fostering a profound sense of ownership, understanding, and an unbreakable bond to the spaces they share, each project weaves an intricate tapestry of geospatial data that fortifies the very fabric of community connections.

We hope that by exploring this global array of projects, you will be as inspired as we were to think about the epistemological and methodological shifts community-engaged digital mapping requires of both its creators and users.

In this issue we feature:

• Native Land: Powered by data, technology, and historical research, Native Land Digital uses counter-mapping to showcase Indigenous territories globally while enhancing the visibility and resilience of Indigenous history and narratives. This multi-faceted mapping platform features the ability to link a given territory to a law or legislative body, enabling users, particularly Indigenous individuals, to track the timeline of their territorial rights. Using sources including oral history, written documents, and authoritative maps, this digital interactive map, powered by Mapbox and WordPress presents a colorful overlap of Indigenous territories, languages, and treaties for users to check. This project is directed by Mesiah Burciaga-Hameed, Kyle Napier, Rudo Kemper, Shauna Johnson, Moka Apiti and is reviewed by Thiago da Costa Oliveira.

• imagineRio: Designed to welcome researchers, students, and residents, imagineRio is a digital platform dedicated to the history of Rio de Janeiro since its foundation. This learning hub integrates various historical documents, such as photographs, maps, and urban reform plans. The "Narratives" section, the most innovative part of the portal, allows users to create map-based stories about Rio's past using geographic layers. Users can write stories, upload their own visual materials, and embed audio and videos. Built primarily with ArcGISPro and WebGL, this project is a collaboration between Rice University, Instituto Moreira Salles, and AxisMaps. It is directed by Farès el-Dahdah and Alida C. Metcalf and is reviewed by Luis Antonio Coelho Ferla.

• Mapping Black California: Mapping Black California (MBC) is a multi-faceted data project from Black Voice News. The data-sharing platform uses a combination of Esri products, including ArcGIS, to empower Black Californians to effectively leverage state and local data in their quests for social and economic justice. By making key data accessible across its platform, MBC offers an indispensable resource for empowering Black-led, guided, and driven solutions to complex problems. It also has significant potential for use in educational settings as it supports multiple data storytelling projects that amplify the historical and contemporary concerns of Black communities across the Golden State. The project was founded by second-generation publisher and journalist Paulette Brown Hinds and is directed by Candice Mays. The project is reviewed by Ashanté Reese.

• Cocôzap: This community-driven initiative in Brazil focuses on race, human rights, urban infrastructure, and sanitation. Launched in 2018 to address state neglect and data scarcity in favelas, Cocôzap uses WhatsApp to monitor reports about water supply, waste, drainage, and sewage issues. Residents can report issues by sending locations, photos, and videos. A “Complaints Panel” on the website georeferences these reports, supported by Cocôzap ambassadors who ensure data representativeness. The project offers data visualization tools, infographics, and a podcast series to engage the community and advocate for change. This methodology has significant potential for replication and has gained national and international recognition. The project is directed by Clara Sacco and Gilberto Vieira and is reviewed by Juliana Marques.