Week 5: Catch-up Week

Prepare for the Research Talk

Due by Tuesday, June 25: 

1. Choose one of the Bucknell Student led websites listed below and spend 10 minutes navigating through and looking over what it does.
   • The Sugar Mills Project – This project involves researching, mapping, historicizing, and narrating the sugar mills of Antigua. As part of a summer 2016 course in the Caribbean, Professor Carmen Gillespie and a group of students began surveying the land on the island of Antigua with a keen eye towards the island’s history. Since then, the project has gone further to investigate the numerous sugar mills on the island, which totaled about 200 though many have deteriorated. Despite the size of the island — about the same size as Union County – the landscape is overwhelmed by the presence of sugar mills once surrounded by sugarcane fields worked by enslaved laborers. In 2018, a group of Bucknell student engineers worked with the Griot to create a digital template for this project, which is an interactive, web-based map of Antigua that includes each of its six parishes and every sugar mill that existed in its history. The interactive map provides information about each mill, its ownership chronology, additional details about the mill. Currently Griot Director Fourshey and intern Barbara Wankollie are fleshing out historical specifics about the enslaved peoples who worked the sugar fields and mills of Antigua. This year the project was edited by Barbara Wankollie, a Fremont Scholar and Griot intern, and Ryleigh Roberts, an English graduate student and Griot intern.
   • Black History Timeline – The Griot Institute created and maintains the Bucknell Black History Timeline, which was created by Bucknell student Marissa Calhoun ‘10.  The Black History timeline details and highlights meaningful and significant milestones in Bucknell University’s Black history; in recent years, it has changed to a digital platform. Griot interns organize and enhance the accessibility of this project, they also do research and reach out to past and current students, faculty, and staff to add new information they uncover. This year the timeline was managed by Griot intern, Jeremiah Charles.
   • The Bucknell Civil Rights Project – The Bucknell Civil Rights Project is an archive of Bucknell’s records from the Civil Rights, documenting civil rights issues at Bucknell. Information on Bucknell’s NAACP chapter, scholarship opportunities for black students, and African American speakers that visited the University are included, as well as other initiatives (e.g., exchange programs with historically black universities, attempts to increase diversity, etc.). Griot interns are transferring the data to a new digital platform, organizing and editing the material, and further expanding the narrative. This year the project was edited by Griot intern Michaiah Augustine ‘24.
   • Griot Institute Storytelling Project – Inspired by the figure of the griot as a multifaceted storyteller — at once poet, artist, historian, economist, sociologist, and musician — the project gathers oral narratives from members of the Bucknell community in an effort to define who we are at this moment in our collective history. In past years, the project was designed by professors as pedagogical projects, as well as free form narratives from members of the Bucknell community. In 2022-23, Griot interns were particularly interested in archiving conversations regarding the current era, with a particular focus on archiving Black lives and experiences of students at Bucknell. In 2023-2024, the student intern conducting the project focused on collecting the narratives of Bucknell alumni. The 23-24 Storytelling Project was managed by Griot Intern Ninah Jackson.
   • African Girlhoods/Black Joy Project – African Girlhoods examines the narratives of young women, or those often referred to as girls in African societies. The project collects various artistic and intellectual artifacts ranging from drawings to poetry, podcasts, and social action initiated by and sustained by young women. Holiness Kerandi and Barbara Wankollie, Griot interns, attended the National Women’s Studies Association Conference to present their research that they contributed to the project this year.
2. Spend 5-10 minutes navigating through one of these two sites to see what it does:
   • African Matrilineal Histories
   • 2023 Summer Institute on Revisioning African Girlhoods: Humanizing the Girl & Girling Humanity
3. Spend 10 minutes navigating through some of the pages on the Slave Voyages Database to see what it does with data, animations, images, and narrative.
4. Think a little about what it takes to develop any of these sites in terms of time, people, resources, and research processes and come to the session with some ideas.