Finding and Founding: Next Steps in Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities

This essay recounts the origins and evolution of Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities (Mapping BDPH), a relational database and website that identifies and connects over 700 Black studies projects in the overlapping fields of digital and public humanities. Born from the challenges of sustaining a local Black historical recovery initiative, Mapping BDPH operates as a “counter-mapping” intervention that applies the methodology of finding the diverse and often marginalized work already being done in the field, and founding new coalitions, infrastructures, and methodologies to support it. We detail the project’s inclusive yet precarious grassroots approach to creation, which involves students, faculty, and library professionals, and which is grounded in the principles of shared authority and a politics of care. Finally, we consider the ethical challenges of amplifying work in Black studies and Africana digital technologies during a period of intense political hostility and technological precarity. We argue that, despite these uncertainties, our finding and founding methodology remains a vital strategy for supporting and sustaining liberatory praxes in the Black digital and public humanities.