From the Rock Wall to Wikipedia

Project Leader: Dr. Courtney Rivard (DLC Lab Director)

Project Team: Alexandra Odom (DLC Lab, Department of History), Rolando Rodriguez (UNC Libraries), Dr. Carly Schnitzler (Johns Hopkins University), Katherine Stein (DLC Lab, Department of English), Dr. Kathryn Wall (Marian Creek Jackson Center)

In partnership with The Marian Cheek Jackson Center, a hub of creative action dedicated to preserving the history of Black neighborhoods in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, this collaborative Wikipedia project strives to make local Black history more accessible to a wider audience. Through this collaboration, the project aims to raise the Jackson Center’s digital footprint and make these important histories more available by leveraging the affordances of Wikipedia, which often occurs as a top result in search engines.

In Spring of 2023, the team partnered with Dr. Courtney Rivard’s ENGL114 course, “The Rhetorics of Data,” to develop a digital public humanities project in collaboration with the Jackson Center that explored the relationship between knowledge production, power, and data. Building from the stories and histories from the Jackson Center’s oral history archive,  From the Rock Wall, Rivard’s class created 6 Wikipedia pages for the Jackson Center with the help of the DLC Lab project team: Hollywood Theater, Hargraves Community Center, Hackney School, Pottersfield, St. Paul AME, and Watts Restaurant.

Recently, the project team was accepted into the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) to further develop this project; their participation in the Institute will lead to an open-access publication on using Wikipedia to promote community organizations and teach students digital literacy skills