Welcome to the first blog post for the Caribbean Women Healers Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions! As part of the University of Oregon Libraries Digital Scholarship Center’s Faculty Grants Program, over the next 10-12 months two research faculty (Professor Alai Reyes-Santos and Professor Ana-Maurine Lara) from the University of Oregon Anthropology department and Ethnic Studies department, their undergraduate research assistant, and UO Libraries library faculty, and staff, and graduate student employee, and undergraduate Digital Research, Education, and Media Lab student workers will be collaborating and contributing to the scholarly and technical construction of this open-access digital humanities project. Together our team will be working toward making interviews with women healers and an ethnobotanical guide publicly accessible for research, education, and teaching purposes. However, this work ultimately gives a virtual space for Caribbean communities living in diaspora-away from the islands-to maintain intergenerational transmission of traditional healing methods and knowledge production, and a virtual space for interviewees to share their healing traditions with the desire to use media as a way to reproduce knowledge across generations as well as across communities.
Last week our team got together for our first gathering — Our kick-off and project planning meeting. Together we discussed the project’s vision and goals and how we could “host interviews and an ethnobotanical survey, not using scientific names, but using the names for the plants that the healers used, to honor the ways that the healers use them.” (Alai Reyes-Santos and Ana-Murine Lara, 2018 DSC Faculty Grant Application) All with the goal of showcasing women healers’ knowledge and giving value to it; much is being lost due to migration patterns, lack of intergenerational knowledge transmission, and urbanization patterns.
After a questions and answer session that included discussion about the state of the research before the digital project’s formal start; our formal timeline for completion (project goal of end of March 2020); IRB, the website’s target audience; look and feel and information presentation with major consideration to multicultural accessibility; anonymization of geographic data from digital photographs of botanical image; and project and research data intellectual property rights. We broke out into project planning and brainstorming. Based a team members individual project role and responsibilities and thinking about how their work depends on each other, everyone used post-its to ideate tasks and categorize them in planning, content and design, technical build, celebration, and maintenance phases.
We were able to accomplish what is now our publicly accessible digital project plan. The software we are using to support our project management and communications is called Smartsheet. If you’re interested in keeping up with our project in real-time then check out the Project Board page on this website. You can view our project as a Kanban board (visualizing project tasks and status), a calendar, a Gantt chart, or a spreadsheet grid. In addition to the communication of our digital project plan, this website is meant to making our non-traditional scholarly communications project process openly available for others to learn from and recognize how much invisible labor going into designing and constructing this open digital humanities project.
Our next steps in the project are to move from the project planning phase into content creation and design. Stay tuned for more project updates!