July 14-16, 2021
@ Temple University

Thank you to all attendees, presenters, and organizers!


Keystone DH and Temple University Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio hosted this year’s virtual conference July 14-16th, 2021.

Recordings from this year’s conference sessions are available through Temple Library.

Explore the full schedule here.

Keynote: “What can Black digital humanities be? Movements, Collectives, Principles”

Jim Casey, Colored Conventions Project (CCP), Penn State University

Kevin Winstead, Colored Conventions Project (CCP), Penn State University


Black digital humanities has come a long way. In the past decade, emerging and established Black DH practitioners have created new formations and communities, including NEH Summer Institutes (Nieves and Gallon), special journal issues (Johnson and Neal), The Digital Black Atlantic (Risam and Josephs), research centers (AADHUM and DigBlk), digital archives (DocNow), and a burgeoning canon of scholarship on contemporary Black digital life and culture (Bailey, Benjamin, Brock, Foreman, Nelson, Noble, Parham, Steele, and many more). The current state of the field builds on the towering legacies of projects such as, among others, the Project on the History of Black Writing (Graham et al) and e-Black Studies (Alkalimat). An open Google Doc created by the Colored Conventions Project in 2017 now links to more than 300 Black digital projects, events, and resources. And Black digital work thrives in the arts, museums, and racial justice movements. These achievements represent only a small fraction of the vibrant and visionary work in Black DH pushing into many fields and worlds.

And yet these fields have blossomed in the years between the murders of Trayvon Martin and Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland and George Floyd. It is a pattern of truth and reconciliation, the backlash of anti-Black racism and the advance of Black digital studies.

In this talk we will share our collaborative and collective journeys. We each began in the early days of Black Twitter and the Colored Conventions Project, and played parts in the launch of AADHUM, Douglass Day, and DigBlk. We’ll share the questions that arose at each step about who, how, and why — about the all-important struggle to balance access to institutional resources with accountability to Black communities. Those questions point us to the principles that ground our work now, and where Black digital collective work might lead us next — such as the #BlackDigitalSyllabus.

Keystone DH is a network of institutions and practitioners committed to advancing collaborative scholarship in digital humanities research and pedagogy across the Mid-Atlantic. This year, the Keystone DH conference will be hosted virtually by Temple University’s Charles Library on July 14-16th, 2021.


Questions? Feel free to contact us at contactkeystonedh@gmail.com.


Keystone DH 2021 Organizing Committee

  • American Philosophical Society
  • Bryn Mawr College
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Haverford College
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • Lehigh University
  • Penn State University
  • Rosemont College
  • Rowan University
  • Rutgers University
  • Swarthmore College
  • Science History Institute
  • Temple University
  • University of Delaware
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • Villanova University