#myshawu was a first-year writing based student project I created and managed at Shaw University. These website contained over 1600-image of campus history project that is no longer supported due to technological and institutional changes. From 2013-2015, I created #myshawu as a prototype for the teaching of writing through student-generated social media images that archive campus history.

The proof-of-concept application utilized North Carolina State University Libraries’ open-source application Lentil. Students used their mobile phones and social media platform Instagram to document their experiences at Shaw University, the South’s oldest Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Founded at the end of the Civil War and an important locus of the Civil Rights era, including the birthplace of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Shaw University’s history became a resource by which students could compose their present and re-engage that history through their own mobile, networked multimodal compositions.

The #myshawu project created a form of praxis, a way for students to document and transform social and educational experiences through producing and circulating images that connect Shaw’s past with students’ present lived experiences. Over its two-year run, this project broadened and extended to include new cohorts of students and ancillary projects like student-conducted oral histories from former Shaw University presidents and notable alumni. The #myshawu project speaks to the potentials of large-scale social media-based projects for circulation-based writing theories and pedagogies, community-building, campus history archiving, and student-led undergraduate digital humanities projects.