The Microgrant Coordinators are pleased to announce the selected projects for the 2023-24 CDSC microgrant program. The second round of the microgrant program received an overwhelming response of high-quality applications, with a wide range of applicants, projects, and scholarships demonstrating the richness of the Caribbean. The application exceeded our participation, doubling the number of submissions compared to its inaugural year. Special thanks to this year’s committee members, Kaiama Glover and Katerina Gonzalez Selingman, for your guidance and support during the arduous selection process. We also thank our microgrant mentor, Hope Cullinan.

The CDSC is proud to have your trust in supporting many of these initiatives, and we hope we can continue fostering a healthy and thriving community around Caribbean Digital scholarship. Below are the awardees for the microgrant program.

Recasting Credit and Capital: A Spatial History of Atlantic Creditors and Debtors in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790-1830

Elbra David, (Independent scholar)

United States

Total: $5,000

Recasting Credit and Capital is a digital mapping Project that connects the Supreme Court decisions based on the debt recovery claims of Atlantic merchants in the Lower Mississippi Valley to how property was bought, sold, and mortgaged locally by planters and merchants. David has mined deed and mortgage records to build a timeline with a slider corresponding to the history of legal cases over property, the seizing of assets such as slaves, and the effect of international conflicts on the rise of the plantation complex. This mapping Project will allow students and instructors to connect the connections between slavery, the law, and space configuration in the lower Delta.

Memories of Trinidad and Tobago’s Black Power Movement

Avah Atherton (Independent scholar)

Trinidad and Tobago

Total: $5,000

Memories of Trinidad and Tobago is a digital preservation project that will archive the oral history of the Black Power Movement in Trinidad and Tobago. Atherton’s project will conduct interviews with those who participated in the movement to shed light on how it impacted Trinidad and Tobago socially, politically, and culturally. These interviews will then be processed and archived on an accessible, user-friendly digital platform that will preserve these oral histories and engage communities through collaborative efforts with local schools, museums, and cultural organizations in Trinidad and Tobago. By preserving and sharing these memories, this project aims to connect individuals with their past by fostering a deeper understanding of the complexities of the Movement and its enduring impact on Trinidadian society.

Queerly Stated: A Living Queeribbean Archival Forum

Jacqui Brown (Emory University) and Dave-Ann Moses (Independent Communications Consultant)

Jamaica and United States

Total: $5,000

Queerly Stated is a diasporic Queeribbean cultural organizing collective that develops multimedia projects and community-building activities between Critical Caribbean Studies scholars and Feminist and Queer Justice practitioners. It is also the core team behind the Under the Sycamore Tree podcast. With the help of the microgrant, this project will extend the work of the podcast by archiving the spaces that Queeribbean practitioners and scholars create for themselves and the influence of this scholarship in near real-time. The team will also continue creating multimedia projects designed around Queeribbean scholarship to distribute to community members, catalyze rigorous scholarly community conversations, and serve as a template for long-term internal Queeribbean archiving.

From the Caribbean Coast to the Pacific Coast: Puerto Rican Archival Networks

Nicole Hernandez (Arizona State University), Maui Puerto Rican Association

United States

Total $4,950

From the Caribbean Coast to the Pacific Coast will digitize the archival collection of the Maui Puerto Rican Association (MPRA), an intergenerational nonprofit founded by the first Puerto Rican families who settled in Hawai’i in the 1900s. The collection includes photographs and documents about the history of this diasporic community. Like the organization, the project seeks to question geography's role in history as it seeks to illustrate inter-island connections, surpassing national and regional boundaries. The project will build a counter-archive that decenters the continent and explores how Puerto Ricans in Hawai’i remain connected to the broader diaspora through digital archives and oral histories, stories of displacement and belonging, and shared knowledge across the diaspora.

Guy Gabon: Empreintes d’art dans la ville (Guy Gabon: Art footprints in the city)

Alicia Doyen-Rodriguez (University of Massachusetts Boston) and Guy Gabon (Artist)

Guadeloupe

Total: $1,500

Guy Gabon Empreintes d'art dans la ville is a hybrid digital exhibition based physically in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in the form of a tour to four different downtown locations, and hosted virtually on the OpenTour platform. By delving into Gabon's artwork and past installations, the physical and virtual tours invite users to wander from location to location while exploring pressing issues like climate change and the Transatlantic Slave Trade on the island.

Racially Yours:” The Floridine “Florence” Pitters Repatriation Archive

Adisa Vera Beatty (Pennsylvania State University)

Jamaica and the United States

Total: $4,012

Racially Yours aims to create a digital archive about Floridine “Florence” Pitters, an Afro-Jamaican activist and writer. The digital archive will hold nearly two dozen letters that Pitters wrote to colonial administrators, the “Repatriation Bill of Jamaica and The West Indies” composed by Pitters, newspaper and journal clippings, a fictionalized autobiographical story she submitted to a writing contest months before her death, and oral interviews with family members. The platform will also include a detailed database and lesson plans to navigate the collections. The project will inspire dialogues about Afro-Caribbean women liberators who participated in anti-colonial and Pan-African movements.

Wikipeetia offline a través de redes locales

Leonardi Fernández (Universidad del Zulia)

Colombia and Venezuela

Total: $5,000

Wikipeetia offline is a linguistic revitalization project that focuses on people from the Wayuu communities in La Guajira (the frontier region between Venezuela and Colombia). Wikipeetia has been working for several years working with Wayuu communities to create Wikipedia pages users can take advantage of to revitalize their language. The microgrant funds will be used to redesign their current interface to create an offline version that students and teachers can use from their phones. They also plan to expand the Wikimedia pages by adding more information to Wayuunaiki.

In the Streets of Le Cap

Carrie Glenn (Niagara University) and Camille Cordier (University Lyon Lumièreand)

France and the United States

Total: $4,000

Carrie Glenn and Camille Cordier will visually reconstruct Cap-Français during the 18th century, the economic and cultural capital of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The visualization tools will highlight the transformation of this Caribbean city and allow users to search for specific individuals. The PIs have completed the project's first stage by transcribing and translating data for over 5,000 individuals and buildings and georeferencing this data with QGIS software. They will now complete the project's second stage by adding searchable features for their platform to identify specific individuals and find information on dwellings represented in the maps. A final iteration of the project—to be completed later—will allow the public to visualize the city's evolution by navigating from one data layer to another.

Virtual Altar: From an Other through an Unknown to an Elsewhere

Christin Washington (University of Maryland)

Guyana and the United States

Total: $7,700

Virtual Altar is an immersive media installation that engages cultural memory and possessions. Serving as a multidimensional map, it traces the geographic route of Afro-Caribbean migrants from countries in the Caribbean Sea to new lands they call home to psychic spaces they produce. This installation is an artisanal tech approach that rejects realism and trusts black folks’ perception to become attuned to cultural perspectives on space and memory. It syncretizes spatial technologies such as the body and 3-D terrestrial laser scanning to reclaim African-syncretic rituals that have been subject to legal and social persecution, celebrate the lives and memories that have endured migration, and address the conjuncture of embodied spirituality and geospatial technologies as media capable of enabling or disabling situatedness.

A Digital Archive of Caribbean Deaf Histories

Rehana Omardeen (European Union of the Deaf) and Ben Braithwaite (University of the West Indies)

Trinidad and Tobago, Germany, and the United States

Total: $7,838

This project will draw from existing digital collections and currently ongoing documentation work to compile a digital archive of personal and community histories from deaf people around the Caribbean, expressed in a variety of indigenous Caribbean signed languages. Communities represented will include those from Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, Providence Island (Colombia), the Bay Islands (Honduras), and Puerto Rico. Videos will showcase diverse sign languages, and be accompanied by translations in English and Spanish, to provide a broadly accessible resource in an area of community history that has been hitherto almost entirely overlooked. The project will complement a recently established network of Caribbean deaf researchers, helping to further build capacity for deaf-led research in the Caribbean through collaboration and training, and providing an impactful public platform for current documentary work.

The Cuban Hip-Hop Archive (CHHA): First Database and Digitization Prototype

Pablo D. Herrera Veitia (University of Toronto)

Cuba and Canada

Total: $5,010

The Cuban Hip-Hop Archive operates at the intersection of digital and public humanities to develop the first digitization prototype of Cuban Hip-Hop materials. The project will collaborate with the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto to create a platform to centralize Cuban hip-hop data from press and journal articles, books, magazines, song lyrics, and music in an accessible database.

Shadow Scholars: A Black Woman’s Archive of Dominican Society Dominican Republic

Sophia Monegro (University of Texas at Austin)

Dominican Republic and the United States

Total: $5,000

Sophia will design an open-access digital collection of archival documents, scholarly introductions, biographical sketches, interactive maps, and classroom resources about African and African descendant women thinkers across the long historical milieu of Dominican society. The collection will include a repository of resources that trace the intellectualism of Black women who were rarely literate yet authored enduring legacies in circum-Caribbean spaces. The platform will craft a genealogy of how organic intellectuals in the first colony of the Americas resisted, accommodated, and endured during the colonial period (1492-1844). Shadow Scholars will ask users to expand on what constitutes intellectualism in Caribbean history. It shows us how digital resources help us acknowledge Caribbean actors as part of the rich intellectual production beyond the realm of letters.

Queer Archives of Trinidad & Tobago

Angelina V. Nixon, Nikoli A. Attai, Alessandra Hereman, Catherin Shepherd, Keith McNeal (CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice)

Trinidad & Tobago

Total: $10,000

CAISO is a feminist civil society organization committed to ensuring wholeness, justice, and inclusion for Trinidad and Tobago's LGBTQI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex) communities, by developing analysis, alliances, and advocacy. Their project, “Queer Archives of Trinidad and Tobago,” is a curation of Trinidad and Tobago’s queer history from 1960 to the present. These archives include two significant collections of queer history: The Cyrus Sylvester Archive and a public Timeline of LGBTQI+ T&T History. The research team is currently cataloging this archival material and identifying aspects that could be available to the public. As young and “living” archives, they have also considered their ethical commitment to protecting the persons and material within them.

Bibliothèque Haïtienne des Frères de l’Instruciton Chrétiene (Haitian Library of the Brothers of Christian Instruction)

Marie-France Guilaume, Wandred PIierre and Notis Mosenor

Haiti

Total: $5,000

The BHFIC is the second oldest library in Haiti and currently holds over 10,000 documents. It includes various publications, rare newspapers, original primary sources and assorted collections from famous Haitian writers that span from the Spanish colonial period (1492-1697) to the present. Before the country's situation deteriorated, it had long welcomed students from abroad for their research work: France, Duke University, Harvard (twice), and Haitians living in Haiti and abroad. The library's rare collections are currently in danger and have called for our support in an emergency digitization project of their collections. Funding from the CDSC microgrant will help support an emergency digitization project of their collection that is currently in danger.

Kingston 21: A digital press for Caribbean plays

Kelly Baker Josephs (University of Miami)

United States

Total: $10,000

Kingston 21 will be a digital press dedicated to publishing editions of Caribbean plays. It plans to launch in Fall 2024 with four plays, complete with contextual information (introductions, footnotes, related bibliographies, etc) for scholars and students. It then maintains a publishing schedule of 1-2 editions each year following the launch.

To all the recipients, congratulations! We are excited to see your projects come to fruition. To our community, please stay tuned for more information about the Micro-grant program. We look forward to seeing your applications in the next round!