Best electronic resource
May 01, 2017
Colored Conventions Project, UD Library receive national recognition
The Colored Conventions Project (CCP) has won the best electronic resource prize from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA).
Carol Rudisell, librarian in the Reference and Instructional Services Department at the University of Delaware Library and CCP project member, accepted the award on behalf of the CCP and the University of Delaware Library at the PCA/ACA annual conference, held April 12-15 in San Diego, California.
The CCP is an interdisciplinary scholarly project that brings the history of the convention movement — and the many leaders and places involved in it — to digital life. The Colored Conventions movement began in response to the violence and expulsion faced by free Blacks across the United States. From 1830 until the end of the century, hundreds of state and national meetings followed, anticipating the founding of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP.
ColoredConventions.org houses the first digital collection of these minutes, many of which were previously out of print and difficult to find. The CCP’s growing archive and the many digital exhibits that tell the stories that emerge from the conventions have sparked renewed national interest in these historic meetings.
The PCA/ACA best electronic resource award recognizes the growth and importance of new academic formats.
“We are delighted that our collective effort to recover this early movement for Black voting, educational and labor rights has received recognition from an organization that focuses on American and popular culture,” said P. Gabrielle Foreman, co-founder of the CCP and Ned B. Allen Professor of English at UD. “The convention movement speaks to current issues: state sanctioned anti-Black violence, unequal pay and schooling, that resonate as strongly as ever.”
“It was a real honor to accept the award on behalf of the Library and the CCP and to attend the PCA/ACA conference,” said Rudisell. “While I was familiar with the association’s Journal of Popular Culture, which provides such insightful analysis of American culture, I had never attended their conference. The conference papers were absolutely fascinating and the topics wide-ranging. “Teaching Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Hollywood’s Slave Narratives” and “Frederick Douglass/Finn and Frederick Bailey/FN-2187: The Doubled Selves of Slavery in Star Wars: The Force Awakens” are examples of two papers that examined the representation of slavery and Black activism in popular film. They helped me to realize that the digital archive built by the Colored Convention Project not only supports new scholarship on the African American experience, but it can also provide source material for creative, interpretive works as well.”
The Colored Convention Project
The Library has an agreement between Gale, a global provider of research resources and part of Cengage Learning, and the CCP regarding the use of Gale’s database, 19th-Century U.S. Newspapers. This agreement allows the CCP to present images from Gale’s database for use in its exhibits, which brings seven decades of 19th-century Black organizing to digital life. Another agreement between CCP and Accessible Archives allows the CCP national teaching partners and the almost 1500 students that have adopted its research curriculum to present historical images from the Accessible Archives databases alongside interactive maps and visualizations the project creates on the ColoredConventions.org website.
The CCP received the Modern Language Association’s 10th Biennial Prize for a Bibliography, Archive or Digital Project and a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant in 2016. On Feb. 14, 2017, CCP hosted a national “transcribe-a-thon” of convention proceedings as part of a 199th birthday party for Frederick Douglass. Douglass was active in the convention movement for a full 40 years along with thousands of Black people who advocated for full citizenship rights for all people, regardless of race.
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