Dante Nahai/ Staff Writer
Miami and South Florida have a wealth of history and cultural artifacts from the diverse communities they contain. However, connecting communities with their artifacts and history can be a challenging task.
That’s why FIU’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) recently received a grant of one million dollars from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their project on digitizing local communities’ history.
The New-York-City-based Mellon Foundationone of the largest supporters of the humanities and arts in the U.S.
The project, which is called Community Data Curation: Preserving, Creating, and Narrating Everyday Stories, which was made to preserve stories from various communities in South Florida.
There are a total of eight institutions that the WPHL are working with at the moment to digitize a part of their collection:
Stonewall National Museum and Archives, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, Museum of Graffiti, Jewish Museum of Florida – FIU, World AIDS Museum and Educational Center, Historic Hampton House, Broward County Library’s African American Research Library and Cultural Center, and Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center.
Speaking with the founding director of WPHL, Dr. Rebecca Friedman, she explained the usage of the grant.
“The grant grew out of this desire to connect to communities and work with them. These types of collaborations with big institutions like FIU and smaller ones have an issue with the smaller insitutuion’s voice being lost.”
One of the big aspects of this grant is so that these smaller institutions have their voices heard. To give the power to those institutions.
With this they can control which parts of their collections they want to digitize. Since the grant supports the digitization of parts of the collection of the eight institutions.
But that isn’t the only purpose of the grant.
“We also want to create new information, and new archives through oral history,” Friedman said. “We’re going to have FIU student interns working with those communities to help with this process.”
All of this work and technology put into this will remain with the institutions.
“The Mellon Foundation was excited by the fact that we were facilitators in the process, and it’s a way for Mellon who is interested in supporting smaller institutions to work with us to make that happen.”
At its core this project allows communities to identify their stories they want told, and allow them to tell their stories, to record their stories, and to digitize their stories.
They receive help from students, expertise, and whatever they want outside their own community from the university.
“It is a way of working together led by those organizations themselves to create, craft, narrate and present their stories to broader audiences,” Friendman explained.
There is no singular story of any community; there will always be multiple voices. So the decision of which voices should be heard and how they are heard rest in a hierarchy of power.
The hope of the structure of this grant is that it will help resign that power with the communities themselves.
While it all depends on the communities and how they want to approach this process of creating and storing their stories, this also builds a bigger community among the eight institutions.
It might be thought that the reason why this digitizing process was thought up due to Covid-19 and the strict enforcement of social distancing and not being able to go out to these museums, but that actually was not the case.
“We are all much more aware of the usefulness of having things available online then we ever were before, and all the positive reach from that. Yet at the same time digitizing makes this information available for a wider audience.”
Digitizing these materials creates a sense of access to any person. While it is up to those institutions to decide whether that information can be stored on the FIU’s servers it will still be available through their network.
The oral histories created together will be available on FIU’s servers as well at those institutions.
While the process is still on going from what they want and what they are comfortable with, know that these documents will soon be viewable.
To hear the multitude of voices that make up the fabric of our communities is important. This project allows the recording and honoring of voices that might not be heard.
If there are any FIU students who are interested in working with the WPHL on this project they can contact Dr. Friedman via email.
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