During the 2023 Keystone Digital Humanities Conference at Johns Hopkins University on June 15, 2023, scholars from the Center for Mason Legacies presented papers to scores of digital humanities scholars and practitioners. Three of them helmed a panel entitled, "Using Digital Public History to Uncover Black Lives Next Door." These presentations highlighted the collaborative experience and methods developed by the CML team thanks to a Catalyst Grant awarded by LYRASIS in 2022-2023 that enabled them to carry out their innovative project. In a presentation based on her research, doctoral student Jayme Kurland discussed the importance of spatially reading slave sales sites. She focused on the Fairfax County Court House as a site of Black precarity and commodification. As a result of her research, Kurland positioned period newspapers as a "textual auction block" that should be systematically investigated to better understand their historical importance. In the second presentation, titled "Collaborating with Students to Uncover Hidden Histories of Northern Virginia," faculty members Wendi Manuel Scott and George Oberle discussed their experience with a set of pedagogical strategies they referred to as "Affective Historical Practice," a justice-centered method of teaching that fuses several teaching practices with Black feminist methodologies. Using these methods, students in the Spring 2023 course created several remarkable digital stories that are available online to the public (including the web exhibit pictured).
In a presentation on "Using Omeka S as a Tool for Pedagogy and Digital Scholarship," faculty member Alyssa Fahringer showed a wide range of digital content produced by CML students over the past few years. Fahringer's research shows how Omeka Classic and Omeka-S serve as flexible content-management tools effective in both teaching and promoting reparative scholarship.