Keywords for Black Louisiana is a pair of websites (docs.k4bl.org and stories.k4bl.org) curating a digital edition of transcriptions, translations, and stories about people of African descent in Louisiana based on French and Spanish colonial documents in the eighteenth and early long-nineteenth centuries. It is a LifexCode project sponsored by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission and Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries. For the past four years, Keywords researchers have engaged manuscripts digitized through the Louisiana Historical Center's Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project and housed in the New Orleans Jazz Museum. Thanks to robust, ongoing community engagement, our project serves as a resource for researchers, cultural workers, genealogists, educators, and students. We hold ourselves accountable to a primary audience of Black New Orleans: community members, descendants, creators, and scholars. This talk will address our data development and curation process, writing and publishing documents and stories on our site, and community engagement and accountability in digital humanities.

Speakers: Olivia Barnard, Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil, Akosa Obianwu, Ellie Palazzalo, and Dr. Nadejda I. Webb

** This session is part of Love Data Week 2025. To attend this session, first register here: https://bit.ly/JH_lovedataweek and then follow the instruction under "Registration and Creating an Itinerary" in the description to add this session to your itinerary. **