Community Data Curation: Preserving, Creating, and Narrating Everyday Stories
In 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at FIU a $1 million grant for “Community Data Curation: Preserving, Creating, and Narrating Everyday Stories.” Rooted in a vision to decolonize the archives and knowledge production, this grant supports and promotes the necessary grassroots work being done in our broader communities, highlighting the lives and experiences of historically underrepresented people and implementing sustainable preservation practices to ensure their stories are told and accessible well beyond the lifetime of the grant.
The project finds WPHL partnering with eight community partners around South Florida and funds the new technology and storage for digital archiving, the creation of new archives through oral histories, as well as public programming, and unique student internship opportunities.
From 2021–2023, WPHL will work with the community partners to purchase technology and equipment, train student interns in digitization best practices, and create a landing page for the approximately 100 oral histories to be collected and made freely available to all.