Boston Research Center: Interview with Co-Director Caitlin Pollock
Caitlin Pollock is the Associate Director of the Digital Scholarship Group. Caitlin spoke with Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, about her work co-directing the Boston Research Center. Her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: To start, I think it would be nice if you could just, before getting into BRC, just kind of introduce yourself in terms of your role in the DSG.
Caitlin: I'm Caitlin Pollock. I'm the Associate Director of the Digital Scholarship Group. I've been in this role for about two and a half years. I supervise our developers and I manage our services, like consultations, troubleshooting of our different platforms and apps that we support and projects we support, and facilitating digital research projects.
I know as part of your role, you are the co-director of the Boston Research Center. Could you, in your own words, describe the goal of the project, the history of it, and how you came into it?
Part of my role is co-directing the Boston Research Center, so I came into it in that I got hired into the job and it was a listed activity of the position when I applied. So I knew ahead of time that I would be taking on this role. In fact, it was one of the things that excited me about the job advertisement when I went and looked at the different BRC projects. The Boston Research Center was, until April 2026, a Mellon-funded partnership between Northeastern University Library and Boston Public Library to facilitate community history projects. The BRC sometimes describes itself as a lab where community members can test out different types of projects. Our main focus areas are oral histories and Wikipedia, Wikidata projects.
We also had the opportunity to give small grants to community groups to do their own work, and that was really exciting. So instead of having faculty facilitate the research, this grant allowed us to work directly with community members with the work that they wanted to do.
That is really great. I would be really interested in hearing a bit more about the experience of working on a project that was situated both in a private academic library and a public library?
I think it's a really fruitful relationship. And frankly, this is my first time working at a private university. I've only ever worked at public research libraries. Some of the restrictions on access to services is still sometimes a culture shock to me. Some things at Northeastern can't be done the way public research libraries can, because they're public. So I quickly saw how partnering with a public library was a way to create avenues for non-affiliated folks to get access to Northeastern materials or more Northeastern services. BPL has branch libraries, which are essentially neighborhood hubs, and the people that we worked with there are embedded in that neighborhood, in that community. By being associated with BPL and the Mellon project, that sort of gave them the academic sheen to get access to Northeastern services. So I think it's really fruitful for Northeastern University Library which wants to do more outreach and work with community history projects and community groups. And then for BPL, as a public library, they have different sort of funding schemes. So essentially, they get access to the apparatus and infrastructure of an R1 university.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How was the development of the workflow with the co-director and specifically for such a public-facing project?
It was really natural for Tieanna [Graphenreed] and I because we got hired really close to each other. I was hired in January and then she was hired in May, and I actually got to sit in on her interview as well. We meshed really well and worked really easily together. I think we were both inheriting a grant project that we had not started ourselves. So if there were any sort of challenges, it was getting on board with all of these projects and learning the project history.
Once we were able to sort of start working on projects of our own, I think it eased a lot. I think for working with community groups, community partners, community researchers, one thing that is different than working with faculty members necessarily is being a lot more flexible about meetings. A lot of community members who are doing research on their neighborhoods have full-time jobs, and so they can't meet during the day. So being able to flex my hours so that I could hold meetings in the early evenings for community members is one thing. I'm very lucky to have a position that lets me be really flexible with my hours as well. I can sort of shift everything by an hour or two.
And then the other thing is informed consent forms. Sometimes we use an MOU with faculty, but never an informed consent form. We would sometimes do that with community members, especially for oral histories, just so there was a clear understanding of what we had agreed upon in the project. Sometimes we would ask them to write us a project plan that Tieanna and I would sign off on before they had access to money in particular. So those things sort of shift. It's a little bit less formal with faculty because the idea that they are university affiliated so there will always be a point of contact. I think community members can sometimes be a little more transient perhaps and sometimes a little bit harder to get in contact with. So having agreements in place ahead of time about how the work will move forward and what will happen if we can't get a hold of you, is essential for community work.
I think the idea that consent is a conversation, it's not a contract, but the idea is that the documentation documents what the conversation is, what we all agree to in the moment and provides avenues for retracting consent or finding ways to change consent.
Something I would love to hear a little bit more like details about, but could you give an example or two of the sort of community led projects that you gave sub grants to?
The best part of the job was cold emailing people, like, “hey, we have $10,000 we want to give you. Do you want to meet with us?” And almost everyone says yes when we send someone an e-mail like that. That was actually really fun, especially working with them to shape what the project was going to look like. It wasn't a credit card that we just gave them to spend as they pleased. It was an agreement of what the work was going to be and making sure that a record of it or a copy of it as much as possible would sit with Northeastern as well, just as a document of their work.
So for example, we gave money to Hola Cultura, which is a digital storytelling organization for the Latine community, in particular teenagers. They focus on DC and East Boston. East Boston has a very large Hispanic population here in Boston. We have this initiative called Sidewalk Stories, and we wanted to publish more sidewalk stories, which are audio stories that you can hear as you're walking around East Boston. Someone happened to tell us about Hola Cultura. We set up a meeting. We really loved the team. And so we offered them money to make three sidewalk stories for us. And they did that by taking Northeastern-stewarded oral histories about East Boston that were done in like 70s, 80s, and 90s. They remixed them to help shape them into narratives, instead of individual oral histories. One is about the history of the graduate organization, graduate organizing in East Boston, starting with organizing against the airport, for example, and working with the city to think about the environmental effects of the airport.
They were a lovely group to work with and we liked them so much, we gave them some more money for a different project called Tide Talks. This project has a similar theme where they are creating digital stories about a specific place, in this case the actuaries around East Boston.
We also gave money to the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston's Teen Photography Collective. We had this product called Neighborhood Public Art, which catalogs public art in different Boston neighborhoods that don't get a lot of visibility. But we had a lot of records that didn't have images, so we gave the ICA team photography collective money and they went around and took photographs of the artworks that we were missing. We gave them a list and the students chose. That resulted in not only the images, but they also designed an art walk, a physical artwork of the public art in Roxbury, and then a physical exhibit at the BPL Central Library of some of the photographs they took. In exchange, the students, the teen photographers learned about Wikidata. That's an example of where we had to teach that in the evening. And we all had to flex our hours back because all the teens were in school. So there was no way we're going to be able to hold this training during work hours. We taught Wikidata around 6:30 p.m. at Northeastern University Library. We got them access. They all came in. The students were very, very impressed by the CDS. And I have to say for 16, 17 year olds at 6:30 at night, they were as into Wikidata as you could be in those circumstances. And they are very much into it. We had a lot of discussions with them about what is public art? Why is public art important? What is and isn't public art? How can you differentiate and should you differentiate? They were a really great group to work with. The students got sort of some data literacy out of the project and we got images that we needed out of the project. So it was very much a symbiotic project. Those are just two examples.
I think for our readers, it could be good to do a quick gloss of Wikidata in general and then talk a little bit about why that's such a commitment for the BRC?
What most people call Wikipedia, is English-language Wikipedia. English language Wikipedia is the largest Wikipedia of them all. The technical infrastructure is stewarded by an organization called the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation actually has several platforms that it supports. It's Wikipedia (that's all the language Wikipedias, not just English), Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and then there's some others. The idea is that they're all public knowledge platforms which can all be edited by the public, by volunteers. They also all have a shared purpose and that is to feed Wikipedia. So the little info boxes you sometimes see in Wikipedia articles are usually being pulled from a Wikidata record. The image that's in the Wikipedia article is being pulled from Wikimedia Commons. They've built this environment that stores all the little essential pieces that become a Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia article can have more information than would ever be in the Wikidata record. While the main purpose of all of these things is to facilitate the publication of quality articles in Wikipedia, it also has the secondary purpose of allowing people access to the information and doing what they want with it. Wikidata allowed us to create catalog records of public art that anyone has access to. They're not behind any sort of paywall or login for Northeastern. So anyone could find these records. Wikidata is essentially just a big, big library catalog for Wikipedia, but also anyone can use it and add records to it. So that's how we use Wikidata. We discovered it made a lot sense for the neighborhood public art project.
But then we went to use it for Boston Black Women Lead, which is a project to create Wikipedia articles about Black women who have shaped Boston from colonial times until now. We were going to create Wikidata records for everyone that needed them and then do the articles. What we discovered is that when we wrote articles in Wikipedia, it was automatically creating Wikidata records. We actually stopped making Wikidata records for Boston Black Women Lead and just made Wikipedia articles knowing that they were going to be eventually made into Wikidata records by a bot.
That is very interesting. That seems like there should be a way for that not to happen!
We couldn't find a way to tell whichever Wikipedia bot auto-creates the records to stop. But we figured we should be taking advantage of the infrastructure of Wikimedia Foundation whenever possible. So we can incorporate the research we're doing on these women into the Wikipedia article, which will then feed into the Wikidata record, and we can save ourselves a little bit of work. It also depends on the project, Neighborhood Public Art had no Wikipedia articles, so we did the Wikidata records. I don't want it to sound like Wikidata is not necessary, it just depends on the project you're doing. So thinking really thoughtfully about how you can use that to be efficient with your project, I think is what we learned. We learned a lot about Wikipedia. I think we also had to navigate how much we had to teach community members about Wikipedia as well.
It's been almost a culture clash between Wikipedia and community history. Wikipedia is all about verified knowledge. Everything has to be a secondary source or tertiary source because it's an encyclopedia and everything has to be notable enough to make it into the encyclopedia. They don't want to be a general repository for all knowledge. They want to be a repository for like notable knowledge, right? Sometimes the women who the community nominated to be part of this project are really, really important to their local community, but they don't meet what Wikipedia has laid out as notable to Wikipedia.
With community history, you're supposed to trust and believe community members about what they say about their neighborhood. They are the experts of their neighborhood. What they say about their neighborhood is true. But the problem is that Wikipedia wants a secondary source. So we can't interview people and then cite them directly in the Wikipedia article. It has to be published somewhere else first. It's a really interesting mix up of community history methods with a public knowledge platform that didn't really mix together that easily. We had to figure out how to sort of jam the community history methods into Wikipedia as much as possible. Part of that was like doing oral histories. We found out that we could create a self-feeding loop where we could do oral histories on some of the nominees and their families, post them in Northeastern's DRS, which then gives it the legibility and authority of a university, and then we could cite it into Wikipedia. We used our sort of academic privilege to figure out a way into Wikipedia.
Is there anything you wanted to highlight about the BRC and what is the current state of the project?
I'm really proud of the work I've done during this Mellon-funded period of the Boston Beacher Center. I had already worked on community projects prior to working at Northeastern, but they had always been led by a faculty member or a PhD candidate. This was my first time working directly with community projects and I felt like I grew a lot as someone who wants to do well in this sphere. I learned a lot and I made some really amazing connections and friends in the Boston community.
As Tieanna and I looked at what is feasible without the funding of a large philanthropic group like Mellon, is what makes the most sense. One thing was making all the work we had done during this Mellon-funded period as reproducible as possible by people not associated with Northeastern. So we created toolkits and taught how to set up your own campaign on Wikipedia, hold your own Wikipedia Edit-a-thons and what are the rules of Wikipedia. For sidewalk stories, we've created guides on how to make your own audio-visual narratives and how to get it onto a poster board and into your neighborhood.
In both guides, we offer support and emails, but we made it so they could essentially just do it on their own without us ever being a part of it. Trying to make the work we've done with the BRC more reproducible was a big priority, because we quickly discovered that stewarding all these projects post-Mellon is going to be a big undertaking. Then we also have decided to switch the BRC to a troubleshooting and consulting model and a teaching model. Our focus will be on workshops, guides, toolkits, training, and consultations with community members, as opposed to making bespoke projects for them. We're looking more at how we can sort of empower community members if possible to make their own projects.