Documentation for Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL) an NHPRC-funded project building a digital documentary edition of stories from slavery's archive
In fall of 2020, Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson planted the seed for this project, bringing together a group of graduate student researchers to start looking into records from French and Spanish Colonial Louisiana that the Louisiana Historical Center has recently digitized. That digitization effort represented an incredible feat in making the documents available to researchers, but there remained references to Black people in Louisiana that the “search” functions overlooked, and important contextualizations that lay beyond the scope of that project. Our goal was to find these individuals and their stories, describe their significance using “keywords,” and make transcription of the hard-to-read handwriting and English translations of those transcriptions.
Our project aims to bring these stories to a broad audience of descendats, teachers, students, creatives, community members, and scholars. Over time, our team has grown to include scholars at various career levels - from undergraduates to full professors - and across numerous institutions. We also began a robust program of community engagement, working with public historians, cultural workers, educators, and descendants as advisors to the project.
Following the links below, you can learn more about the scope and goals of the project as well as our research, transcription, translation, digitization, and community engagement processes. You can also meet our team and our partners.
- List: 100 Keywords Generated by K4BL
- Glossary of Project Terminology
- Progress Summary Data Visualization
- K4BL Document Collection and Conversion Workflow, April 2023
- Sample Documents: Keywords Spring Brunch 2023
- Project Structure
- Black DH Statement
- Louisiana Student Social Studies Standards
- "Housing the Louisiana Archive" a StoryMap created by Olivia Barnard, Associate French Editor and Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
- The Louisiana Colonial Document Digitization Project (LCDDP) at the Louisiana Historical Center and New Orleans Jazz Museum
- Working Bibliography
- Sponsors
Image: The French Market-The Hen Trader, Scribner's Monthly (Nov.1873-Apr.1874), vol. VII, p. 147. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library) via Slavery Images
