About this Project
The Watts Collection came out of The Digital Watts Project, a graduate-level English class taught in summer of 2016 that focused on the 1965 Watts “Uprising” or “Riots.” The class worked with the Southern California Library (SCL) to make available, through a digital public humanities project, primary sources intended to expand the narrative around the events of 1965 and to situate them in a broader context of the history of race and racism in Los Angeles. Exploring the ways in which our background in the humanities could positively enrich our work with the SCL, Melanie Hubbard, a Digital Scholarship Librarian at LMU, and Dermot Ryan, an Associate Professor of English, designed a class that drew on literary texts, history, information science, as well as a number of speakers with disciplinary expertise and firsthand experience to inform the generation of metadata for this project.
- Class syllabus
- Class assignments
- “Digital Humanities as Community Engagement: The Digital Watts Project,” a preprint version of a chapter Melanie and Dermot wrote for the book Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Network, and Community.