The Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference (#umdcc25) and the Minnesota Digital Library Annual Meeting (#mndiglib25) will be held jointly on May 6–7, 2025. It will be an in-person event held in Saint Paul, Minnesota at the Union Depot.
If we want to use research to make meaningful change, we need to intentionally bring people into the creation of new knowledge. From our base in the University of Minnesota Libraries, Mapping Prejudice collaborates with community members to expose the history of structural racism by weaving together digital humanities tools and crowdsourcing technologies into a public history practice. We mobilize community members to identify and map racial covenants, clauses that were inserted into property deeds to keep people who were not White from buying or occupying homes. As we invite people into this process, we need to ensure we are not perpetuating harm or re-traumatizing the communities most impacted by the historical legacies we are unearthing.
To address this, we are developing an interdisciplinary crowdsourcing model, creating culturally sensitive community mapping sessions tailored to the needs of Black and Brown participants. Our team believes that the impact of data is determined by the way that it is created. For Mapping Prejudice to have a lasting impact, we are continuously refining our crowdsourcing process, ensuring our community engagement work centers the communities most impacted by the history of racial covenants and supports productive dialogue around racial inequities today. This presentation will share the ongoing learnings, challenges, questions, tips, and successes from this work.
