MinerAlert
The “Kinship and Longing: Keywords for Black Louisiana” team transcribes, translates, and annotates oft-overlooked manuscript material from eighteenth-century Louisiana to address limitations in the available archive. This is a critical project for the study of early America, Black history, and colonial Louisiana. The research team includes leading scholars of colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, in addition to up-and-coming graduate students. Together, this team is creating digital tools that highlight and help preserve America’s historical records while also making the study of its history more accessible, engaging, and practical. In short, the project is recovering much of Louisiana’s colonial history, as well as its Black and Indigenous history, for scholarly and public engagement. Grant funding allows UTEP graduate and undergraduate students to join Dr. Villarreal’s Spanish Editorial Team where they will do paleography, transcription, and translation and have access to digital production and coding training depending on their interests.