In addition to digitized and searchable transcriptions of the
minutes, the project website offers visitors data for text analysis,
teaching tools and digital exhibits that profile convention
participants, map complex social networks, and explore the community
institutions and businesses that supported the conventions, the NEH
says.
The agency also describes how CCP began with a 2012 graduate seminar
in which Foremans students digitally mapped connections between
delegates to various Colored Conventions.
Foreman, who is the Ned B. Allen Professor of English and professor
of history and Africana studies at UD, is also a senior library research
fellow at the University of Delaware Library and an award-winning
teacher and scholar.
Following the graduate seminar, CCP co-founder Jim Casey 17PhD, then
a doctoral student, proposed moving the project to an academic
platform, and fellow co-founder Sarah Lynn Patterson, a current doctoral
candidate, conducted research on the role of African American women in
the conventions.
The College of Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center provided CCP with its first funding.
The Colored Conventions Project is a team-based digital project
that engages the way thousands of students across the country learn
about racial justice efforts and what tens of thousands of people know
about the long history of civil rights organizing, Foreman said last
year, when the CCP team won the 10th Modern Language Association Prize
for a Bibliography, Archive or Digital Project.
She acknowledged the collective efforts of scores of UD project
participants, national teaching partners and hundreds upon hundreds of
volunteers, as well as the enthusiastic support of the College of Arts and Sciences, UDs dedicated library professionals and leadership and the Department of English.