Advancing Community Digital Collections through Minimal Computing: The Lakeland Digital Archive

FAIN: HAA-269068-20

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Trevor Muñoz (Project Director: June 2019 to April 2025)

The redesign of the Lakeland Digital Archive using minimal computing approaches and the creation of tutorials to teach other community organizations how to build and maintain digital public humanities projects.

Residents of Lakeland, a 130-year-old African American community adjacent to the University of Maryland (UMD) have worked for more than 10 years to document, preserve, and share their cultural heritage. Their ambition has been to capture a history that covers African American life in the long 20th century in their own voices as community members. This project will develop a working prototype of the Lakeland Digital Archive to demonstrate how digital humanities methods such as minimal computing can enhance community-led projects by empowering them to build digital publications that are resilient, shareable online and off, and amenable to models of shared governance. Continuing an existing community-university partnership, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) will collaborate on this Level II grant with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project (LCHP) and other local partners.