About Us

The Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA)  is a crowd-sourced community-inspired digital project that works to highlight the histories, cultures, movements, locations, art, rhetorics, and coalitions of Boston's Black communities before 1940. It uses the multidisciplinary genre of the almanac to amplify awareness and reveal the importance of these early Black histories and cultures, as well as the ways that they shaped Boston's broader history, and thus, its present.

The essential goals of the website are to complement and decolonize the current focus on predominantly white histories of early Boston, as well as to: 

  1. Make the wealth of Early Black Boston histories and cultures more accessible;
  2. Contribute other stories about Boston’s earliest histories; and
  3. Draw upon the affordances of accessible digital tools and techniques.

 

The EBBDA was founded in 2014 and grew out of Dr. Nicole N Aljoe’s research and teaching of Early African American/Black Atlantic literature at Northeastern University in Boston. Grounded in Northeastern’s ethos of experiential learning, students were encouraged to use accessible digital tools to create dynamic learning materials for the broader public about the Early Black writing in Boston, rather than formal academic papers that only the professor would read. All of the information and exhibits on the website were created and curated by students at Northeastern University and Boston Public Schools (BPS)—essentially crowdsourcing and democratizing history and cultural information about Early Black Boston.  

Since its genesis over 10 years ago, the EBBDA website has undergone several significant changes. During the COVID pandemic the website expanded its relationship with community partner, Boston Public Schools, moving more explicitly into formal curriculum development for k-12 classrooms. The curriculum, which was created in collaboration with several BPS faculty members and includes links to specific Massachusetts State Department of Education standards. The k-12 curriculum focuses on two main goals (1) contributing to efforts to empower communities of color to see their connections to Boston’s earliest histories, and (2) introducing accessible digital technologies in the classroom to tell more diverse narratives of Boston.

The EBBDA project has been generously supported over the years with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Northeastern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities, and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Such support has allowed us to develop an ongoing relationship with Boston Public Schools. 

As an open-access, interdisciplinary, community-oriented project, EBBDA works to decentralize knowledge hierarchies within academia by creating meaningful connections rooted in social activism, knowledge creation, and relationship building. The project not only demonstrates the power of experiential education, but also how, through dynamic learning, we have the capacity to “free ourselves” by giving students the tools to see themselves within Boston’s histories.

Project Team:

 

Professor Nicole N. Aljoe

Director

Professor Aljoe’s research focuses on 18th and early 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with a specialization on the slave narrative and early novels. In addition to teaching in these areas, she has published essays and book chapters on these topics as digital explorations of the myriad ways in which the voices of subalterns have appeared in the archives.

 

Savita Maharaj

Project Manager

Savita Maharaj is a PhD candidate in English at Brandeis University. She is working on his dissertation, "Reimagining Caribbean Women’s Futurity  Through Scales of Belonging in Literary and Digital Spheres," which is centered around contemporary Caribbean literature, archival theory, indentureship, enslavement, and critical histories of race and gender. She is honored to be the project manager at the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA).

Amila Shah

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Amila J. Shah is an undergraduate student at Northeastern University, majoring in English and minoring in Biology. She is interested in storytelling, representation, and the recovery of underrepresented voices in literature and history. Through her work with the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac, she is contributing to the development of digital exhibits that highlight overlooked narratives in Black New England history.

Gabrielle Patterson

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Gabrielle Patterson is an undergraduate student at Northeastern University pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in English and Criminal Justice with a minor in Psychology. She is driven by a deep passion for activism, law, and advancing racial equity. Through working with the EBBDA, she hopes to create meaningful change by telling the stories of the often untold and overlooked narratives of Boston.

Teniola Fabunmi

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Teniola Fabunmi is an undergraduate student at Northeastern University London, and she studies Psychology and minors in Philosophy. Teni aspires to become a research psychologist and is passionate about promoting information about Black history/ racial equality and how that translates to today’s society. Currently, with the EBBDA, Teni has been looking at the archival history of past African Americans migrating to London; with this, she aims to answer: How do intergenerational narratives contribute to Black people's concept of self-identity today?

Project Alumni:

Rhya Moffitt Brooke

Graduate Research Fellow

Rhya Moffitt Brooke is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. She holds a Master’s degree in English from Northeastern University and the University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on the intersections of Blackness, gender, and (dis)ability/(un)wellness.

 

Tieanna Graphenreed

Graduate Research Fellow

Tieanna Graphenreed is an English PhD student at Northeastern University studying rhetorics of Black citizenship and Black spatial politics. Tieanna’s research explores questions of rhetorical citizenship through lenses of writing studies and civic rhetorical education, critical geographies of race and space, and digital humanities. Tieanna Grapheneed is Managing Editor for Reviews in Digital Humanities. While at Northeastern, Tieanna has worked on digital projects with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA), and Mapping Black London (MBL); she has also served as Assistant Director of the Writing Center, and developed and led workshops on various digital tools with the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative..

Grace Horne

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Grace is a Northeastern undergraduate student pursuing a major in Political Science and a minor in English. She is interested in archival research, American political culture, and the ways literature reflects society. She joined the team as a research assistant in the summer of 2022.

Juniper Johnson

Graduate Research Fellow

Juniper is an English PhD Student at Northeastern University studying classifications of gender, authority, and disability in nineteenth century domestic medical texts in the United States. Their research explores the history of a/sexuality in women’s professional and popular medical and scientific texts using genealogy, computational text analysis, and critical bibliography. While at Northeastern, Juniper has served as a research assistant for digital projects including: the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), the Homosaurus (a LGBTQ+ linked vocabulary), the Women Writers Project, the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (EBBDA), Mapping Black London (MBL), and the Primary Source Cooperative (with the Massachusetts's Historical Society). They have served as the Coordinator for the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks, and have also developed and led workshops with faculty partners on digital proficiencies for the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative.

 

Tanvi Modi

Graduate Research Assistant – Designer & Developer

Tanvi is a graduate student of Information Design and Data Visualization in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. She worked on rebranding the website with an overall visual design system. She focuses on designing & developing exhibits and navigation pages on the backend using WordPress.

Yana Mommadova

Graduate Research Fellow

Yana joined Northeastern’s Sociology Department in the fall of 2019. She is originally from Central Asia and completed her undergraduate degrees in Economics and Political Science at the American University in Bulgaria. Currently, she is studying right wing populist movements in Western democracies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alanna Prince

Content Management

Alanna Prince is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on contemporary poetry, visual culture, the historical resonance of transatlantic slavery, and Black feminist theory— specifically looking into how creatives, particularly women poets, are using archival documents to retell or reimagine history from a decolonial, womanist, and anti-racist perspective. She is also invested in the digital humanities, working particularly with archives and other digital repositories to ensure that they are designed to be accessible and helpful to all people. She currently serves as the Exhibit Curator and Acquisitions Lead at the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, and as an Editor for Insurrect!, an online magazine for radical thinking in Early American studies. She is currently “Luminous Black: On Making Time, the World, and the Self in Black Women’s Poetry.”

 

Guanying Qu

Graduate Research Fellow

Guanying Qu is a graduate student in the Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University. She joined the team in Fall 2021 as a graduate research fellow. Guanying mainly focuses on building and maintaining exhibits and navigation pages and tools for user interactions.

Nicole Sojkowski

Graduate Research Fellow

Nicole Sojkowski received a BA and MA in English Department at Northeastern University. For the EBBDA, she designed and formatted the website via HTML and CERES Exhibit Toolkit, created the exhibit templates, digitized literature, charts, and maps with Northeastern’s DSG, and worked on onboarding materials for future site editors. She currently works as a marketing specialist at Shiftboard.

Serena Turner

Undergraduate Research Fellow

Serena Turner is currently an undergraduate junior at Northeastern University. She is studying to get her Bachelor's of Art in Communications with a minor in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. She is very passionate about Black Feminist studies and how the intersection of race and gender shape Black women's experiences. She is a recent addition to the team and couldn't be more excited about making more Black stories visible!

The work of EBBDA would not be possible without our funders.