Digital Humanities at The Baltimore Story

Hello and welcome to all who are reading this. My name is Emily Manzo, and I am senior at Loyola University Maryland studying English and Writing this year, and I am the new Baltimore Story intern. My goal for this semester is to learn about how digital humanities can assist in building community with and restoring justice to those who have been overlooked and oppressed in the city of Baltimore, specifically in specific Baltimore neighborhoods. In my experience, digital humanities has become ingrained into the very fabric of the way most people learn within the humanities disciplines. Compiling information, using databases, and making once exclusive knowledge available to everyone has become commonplace where it used to be radical. I find digital humanities to be imperative to progress as it allows for knowledge to accessible to those who seek it. 

It is our job at The Baltimore Story to ensure that the local history is available to all citizens who wish to learn about it. Some of the work that digital humanities does is to make this knowledge more inclusive and ensure that the citizens are able to learn about the history of their neighborhood if they wish to. Baltimore is an area with a rich and oftentimes troubling history filled with racism and oppression of people of color. This is a history that Americans cannot afford to have erased if we ever hope to have progress. It is imperative that we learn from our history, but in order to do so, we must first make sure that we can learn and teach our history in a way that is not glossed over to paint the racial majority in the best light. I hope that by compiling this local history and making it available to more people, The Baltimore Story will help to combat the erasure of Black history. Throughout this semester, I hope that I can learn more about the role that the field of digital humanities has in twenty-first century America and how it can contribute to racial justice and community building. 

— Emily Manzo