About the Project

In 2020, the Mellon Foundation awarded the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University 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.

These institutions include the Museum of Graffiti, Historic Hampton House Museum & Cultural Center, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, World AIDS Museum and Educational Center, Stonewall National Museum Archives & Library, Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, and the African American Research Library and Cultural Center-Broward County Library. From 2021–2024, WPHL is working with the community partners to purchase technology and equipment, train student interns in digitization best practices, and facilitating the collection of approximately 100 oral histories that are freely available to all.

The oral histories contributed by the partner institutions have been grouped into a grant-specific collection on FIU’s dPanther digital repository, available here. Additionally, partners have taken advantage of space on dPanther included in the grant to showcase digitized materials from their own collections. Be sure to check out our partners’ individual pages on this site, highlighting their institutions and showcasing their dPanther collections.

Community Data Curation Oral Histories

In pursuit of collecting approximately 100 oral histories representing a mosaic of oral histories, each partner institution in the Community Data Curation project has contributed 10-12 oral histories. This collection can be searched by contributing institution name, oral history narrator name, subject keywords, geographic location, and more.

About the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab-FIU

The Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab (WPHL) at FIU fosters multidisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach activities that encourage individuals and communities to reflect upon and celebrate diverse heritage, traditions, and history. The lab uses FIU’s status as an urban research institution and its strategic location in Miami to capitalize upon the creative, scholarly and teaching expertise of faculty and professionals who are committed to doing public-facing work. The lab positions FIU as a leader within the emerging field of public humanities by leveraging the resources of the university’s 3 museums along with the research, teaching and production capacities of scholars engaged with the humanities across our campus, including the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs (including the Department of History’s thriving Public History program), the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts, and the College of Arts, Sciences & Education.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the efforts of many. Hadassah St. Hubert, PhD and Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, came up with the original idea for this project and helped in finding the partner institutions. Dr. Rebecca Friedman and Dr. Julio Capó, Jr., Director and Deputy Director of the WPHL, respectively, led this project and liaised with the partner institutions. Enrique Rosell, Program Manager for the Community Data Curation project, spearheaded training and equipment orders for oral history recording with the partner institutions and interns, as well as led hiring efforts for FIU student interns and fund distribution for partners alongside The Wolfsonian-FIU staff. Katie Coldiron, Digital Archivist for the Community Data Curation project, consulted partners on metadata creation, copyright, digitization best practice; trained FIU student interns, and facilitated the ingests of partner materials into dPanther. The indispensable Wolfsonian staff, who were crucial for making this grant work, include Casey Steadman, Isabel Brador, Sandra Solis Hazim, Arita Sheremeti, Richard Del Forn, and Sulaiman Paperwalla. The Digital Collections Center at FIU Libraries staff: Jamie Rogers, Kelley Rowan, and Rebecca Bakker, were also crucial for this grant’s success. Miami's Accord Productions migrated partner VHS tapes to digital format, and Rhoddy Attilus of the Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National's Centre de Documentation in Cap Haitien, Haiti translated and transcribed interviews to/from Haitian Kreyòl. Lou Kramer of the Wolfson Moving Image Archive at Miami Dade College provided advice and gave our first cohort of interns a workshop on digitizing audiovisual materials. Jacek Kolasinski allowed us the use of the FIU Ratcliffe Art + Design Incubator space for an all-partner event in Fall 2022. Finally, the biggest thanks are due to the community partner institutions who trusted us to execute this project in both efficient and ethical ways, as well as the FIU student interns who worked at each institution over the grant period, including the following:

Museum of Graffiti:

Alan Ket, Allison Freidin, Suzanne Criscione

Historic Hampton House Museum and Cultural Center (HHH):

Jacqui Colyer, Edwin Sheppard, Ralphilia Oliver, LaCriscia Fowlkes

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens:

Wendy Wolf, Karen Urbec, Remko Jansonius, Rebecca Peterson, Bruce Williams, Tracy Kamerer

Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (JMOF):

Susan Gladstone, Nancy Cohen, Jacqueline Goldstein, Luna Goldberg, Todd Bothel

African American Research Library and Cultural Center-Broward County Library (AARLCC):

Dr. Ramona LaRoche, Makiba Foster, Afua Ferdnance, Emily Calderon, Emmanuel George

World AIDS Museum and Educational Center (WAM):

Andrew Ruffner, Terry Dyer, Requel Lopes, Tracy Vertus, Jessica Reimers

Stonewall National Museum Archives and Library:

Paola Sierra, Robert Kesten, Hunter O’Hanian, Kendall Millang

Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center:

Gepsie Metellus, Leonie Hermantin

FIU Student Interns:

Dominique St. Victor (AARLCC Spring and Summer 2022), Vinny Nastasi (Museum of Graffiti 2022-Spring 2023), Alejandro Gonzalez (JMOF 2022-Spring 2023), Maryn Matthews (WAM Spring 2022), Ale Ruiz (WAM Summer 2022), Joseph Ale (WAM Fall 2022-Spring 2024), Valentina Timothee (Sant La 2022), Lara Coiro (HHH Spring 2022), Faith Powers (HHH Summer 2022-Spring 2023), Saniya Pradhan (Vizcaya Spring and Summer 2022), Christopher Montejo (Stonewall Spring 2022), Kendall Millang (Stonewall Fall 2022 and Spring 2023), Frantzso Marcelin (Sant La Spring and Summer 2023), Ryan Duran (HHH Summer 2023), Juliana Llanos (JMOF Summer and Fall 2023), Julian Mora (HHH Fall 2023-Spring 2024), Abigail Piervil (Sant La Spring 2024), Aleksander Kara (Sant La Spring 2024), Nicole Andrade (JMOF Spring 2024), Saige Clark (AARLCC Fall 2023-Spring 2024), Michelle Bustos (Stonewall Summer 2024), Alexandra Peek (Stonewall Summer 2024), Rebecca Abraham (AARLCC Summer 2023), Azariah Rodriguez (Vizcaya Fall 2023), Alejandro Raudales (Stonewall Fall 2023), Gabriella Acuna (Vizcaya Summer 2023)