In the Spring of 2023, we collaborated on the development of a project for ENGL 114: The Rhetorics of Data, that tasked students with exploring the relationship between knowledge production and data through a collaborative Wikipedia project with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History, a nonprofit organization that preserves and celebrates the history of Chapel Hill and Carrboro's Black communities. To amplify the Jackson Center's ongoing oral history work digitally, the organization’s public history leaders came together with a team at UNC-Chapel Hill to create a public digital humanities project for undergraduates that would offer students the opportunity to gain needed digital and data literacy skills by meaningfully contributing to the local community. In this case study, we outline: (1) the formation of this collaborative, reciprocal partnership that aids in the mission of the Jackson Center, (2) the power and intrinsic inequities in Wikipedia, and (3) the critical data literacies students develop through such a public humanities project. Ultimately, we argue that Wikipedia can serve as a bridge between community partners and classrooms of higher-ed institutions by centering community histories in accordance with the mission of community organizations to achieve key pedagogical goals, including the development of critical data literacy skills.
Rivard et al. (Fri,) studied this question.