Archiving the Black Web

The Archiving the Black Web (ATBW) project is driven by an urgent call to action to establish a more equitable and accessible web archiving practice to effectively document the Black experience online. The expansive growth of the web and social media coupled with the wide use of these platforms by Black people presents significant opportunities and responsibilities for Black collecting institutions that are interested in documenting the Black experience online. While web archiving practice and tools have grown over the past twenty-five years, it is a cost-prohibitive activity that presents access and resource challenges preventing Black collecting organizations from fully engaging in the practice. At the same time, web archiving practice has developed mostly within an exclusive network of professionals working in well-resourced, primarily white, academic institutions and national libraries in the United States and Europe. The ATBW project seeks to center the needs of Black collecting institutions and archivists working within those spaces. 

Program Director (2024-Present)
I am currently co-developing a web archiving training program with Project Co-Directors, Makiba Foster and Bergis Jules, and in collaboration with our Advisory groups. I also support the ATBW Research Group by providing training in using web archiving technologies and digital preservation as they conduct research projects to map and describe the Black web.

Project Collaborator (2020-2022)
As the Digital Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, I curated and maintained collections of websites, online audio and video, blogs, and other born-digital media—managing one of the only web archiving programs at a Black collecting institution. Each collection was focused on a different topic relating to Black life and culture—including Black artists, Black politicians, and, in response to current events, the African diasporic experiences of COVID-19. My work is particularly focused on developing the #SchomburgSyllabus—an effort to document the #hashtag movement with a collection of public and often crowdsourced online syllabi and reading lists. As an ATBW Collaborator, I relied on my experience with web archiving Black online content to help identify key topics and voices necessary in discussions on developing web archiving practices that document and preserve the brilliant contributions of Black folks to the development of technology and the web.