Visual Resources Association Bulletin

Letter from the Guest Editors

Alanna Prince — 2024-12-31

We the guest editors welcome readers to the special issue of VRA Bulletin, “The Root of Things: Grounding the Digital Humanities in an Increasingly Groundless World.” In this issue, we seek to think about what the digital humanities mean in a world that is becoming increasingly digital while also less humane. As we noted in the call for proposals, “This issue seeks to tackle how we, as digital humanists, archivists, librarians, and otherwise find solid ground to work from as we face an onslaught of precarity exacerbated by systemic injustice.”

Grounding Digital Scholarship in the Analog

Amanda Licastro — 2024-12-31

A digital object is grounded in the analog. By examining the object in a continuum rather than its current state, we can better understand both the analog item and its digital representation. As part of this pedagogical exploration, we reimagined a year-long, library-based, digital scholarship fellowship that provides hands-on instruction for undergraduate students, grounded in physical collections and spaces,but resulting in digital manifestations. The fellowship focuses on social justice by highlighting ethical issues in the field of digital scholarship, specifically exploring the topics of labor, race, gender, disability, infrastructure, and environmental inequality. We frame the work through a pedagogy of play, or critical making, that encourages students to embrace failure.

As instructors and collaborators, our philosophy is deeply informed by the scholarship of André Brock, Miriam Posner, and Katherine Harris, which manifests in the readings and activities we integrate into the course. In the fellowship, students grapple with the theoretical work of a diverse set of scholars (Simone Browne, Shannon Mattern, Lisa Nakamura, Lauren Klein, Catherine D'Agnozio, etc.) and experiment with a wide range of kinesthetic, object-oriented digital literacy activities. Each week, students create digital objects and interact via touch, smell, and feel with analog objects. Our discussions act as the bridge between these two modes, making their relationship explicit. Without the analog objects, the relationship and history these objects have with our library would be lost.

Queens United

Joni Floyd — 2024-12-31

In the midst of aggressive measures to erase Black history and culture through distorted legislation and manufactured popular opinion, there has been a steady increase in the number of institutions working together to acknowledge their historic complicity in U.S. chattel slavery and to atone for the legacies of systemic racism in slavery’s wake. This article is authored collaboratively by two heritage workers who, as descendants from the same enslaved family, seek to leverage their institutional affiliations in order to combat Black cultural erasure by launching a cultural heritage program that centers the goals of the descendant network with which they collaborate.

Genealogist Kevin Porter has been researching Queen family history for nearly two decades. More recently, Porter has engaged with the Sacred Heart Catholic Church (Bowie, Maryland) as it confronts its slave-holding, slave-trading past, which includes Porter’s Queen ancestors. This site was once White Marsh Plantation -- one of five Jesuit-owned plantations in the state. Porter founded his own nonprofit, which he named the White Marsh Heritage Society as a public assertion of the rights of the descendants of the enslaved to claim to that site’s history. Porter has been working with other descendant organizations on envisioning a descendant-led site to be “a place of learning, education and reflection."

Born and raised in the neighborhood founded by Porter’s same ancestors -- Queenstown in Severn, MD -- Joni Floyd has been working in the cultural heritage field for nearly the same amount of time, although she and Porter never met until 2019. In her current role as Curator of Maryland and Historical Collections at the University of Maryland, Floyd specializes in community-based archival interventions (CBAI). This approach has the potential to ground the vision generated by Porter and the other descendant groups connected to White Marsh. This article serves as a blueprint for applying the CBAI approach to the descendant network. It will also offer strategies and insights gained from establishing trust and building capacity in the planning of a heritage project.