Interview with Savita Maharaj, Early Black Boston Digital Almanac
Savita Maharaj is the Project Manager for the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac. Savita spoke with Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, about her work with the EBBDA as both a Northeastern undergraduate and a PhD student at Brandeis University. Her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: Thanks again for meeting with me. To get started, you could introduce yourself and discuss how you got to work for the EBBDA?
Savita: My name is Savita and I did my undergrad at Northeastern. I started working with the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac during my sophomore year of college after I took a class with Professor Aljoe. Now I'm almost a fifth-year PhD student at Brandeis University, so it's really informed a lot of my entry into academic spaces and community spaces.
The EBBDA is an open access site that celebrates, uplifts, and makes known the history, movements, and people of pre-20th century Boston. I would say it's Boston, but it's also open to the greater Boston area as well. We are invested in having community members contribute to the project. We want it to be that you do not need some sort of academic degree to contribute to the site, but more so that we're all contributing to this body of knowledge.
So you've worked on the project for about 7 years, if my math is right. So how long was the project in existence before you were part of it? Were you part of the early discussions at all?
I think I came in during a moment of shifting. I believe the EBBA began in 2014. I came in when we were thinking of revamping the website and updating a lot of our exhibit collections. It looks completely different from when I first started.
I grew up in Boston my entire life. I grew up in Dorchester and never learned about historical black figures, like Phillis Wheatley Peter, David Walker, or Crispus Attucks. I went to Boston Latin School, the oldest public school in Massachusetts, and I did not learn about any of that until I took a class with Professor Aljoe my sophomore year of college. In the class, I learned about all these figures, and I really wanted to make that material accessible to Boston Public School students. I think it's really powerful to have lived in an area and to recognize the black and brown figures who've shaped it. And ever since learning this and working with the EBBDA, it's really informed much of my practices and interests. I'm interested in Caribbean literature, but I'm also interested in localized history and the connections between Boston and the Caribbean, especially regarding conversations about immigration and migration. I'm also really invested in community organizing and making knowledge accessible to the community. It really feeds my soul to work on the project, make these materials more accessible, and see how excited students get when they learn this material. The EBBDA has a really good partnership with Boston Public Schools, and we're working on expanding this.
I would love to hear more about the partnership with Boston Public Schools if you could talk a bit more about that?
We really wanted to host a professional development workshop with Boston Public Schools teachers, but as you can imagine, scheduling is always tough.. But this past fall, we finally got it to happen. We had an intimate group of teachers who were very invested in the materials. It was cool to see them take it up in the classrooms, and we actually got to see some of the brilliant student work that came from it. I think students are excited to use digital platforms because we're living in a digital era. It is also really cool for BPS students to see themselves on the website. None of the professional development projects are on the site yet, but we hope to make that happen one day, and we offer teachers the ability to publish on the site as well. It was very powerful to see how much teachers are doing in the moment, and how they show up so intentionally.
Yeah, I really feel sometimes working in academia can feel a little isolated from the communities we want to serve. This community-centered work the EBBDA is doing is really great. So I imagine that your role has changed over these seven years. Would you be able to sort of give a timeline of that?
Yeah, initially I was an undergrad research assistant, and I was mainly creating exhibits. Then I became the project manager. Our team has been relatively small. So initially, I often worked with one other graduate student. Becoming a graduate student has been really different because I've been working with other graduate students, undergraduate students, and community partners. Now we have an advisory board. I remember the days when we dreamed of having an advisory board, and now we have three brilliant undergraduate students. It is very cool to work with them because I was literally an undergraduate student who became really deeply invested in the project and became the project manager. I try to give them access to things like conferences because I think when I was in undergrad, it was significant for someone to invest that time into me.
It's been so beautiful just to be an undergrad and now be the project manager. I am so proud of how much the project has grown in terms of our stakeholders, our partners, and the visual aesthetics of what the website looked like. We did a BPS workshop recently, and it was just really cool because I was a BPS student, so to now contribute to that knowledge curation I find to be really important and powerful. And you're right, academia is so isolating sometimes. I think about what community I am writing for and how they can access this knowledge.
Has there been any challenges that have gotten you to learn new skills or refactor how you were thinking about the work of the project?
I was terrified of WordPress for the past five years, and now in the last two years, I’ve gotten more familiar with it. We have a great team this year and funding. The funding crisis is really hard on the EBBDA because this was the year we wanted to do more professional development workshops. We had all these plans, and there's no funding for it. So that's really heartbreaking.
I think the funding issue is a challenge that's shared across a lot of the digital work that's happening here. Do you feel like you and your team have identified any, not solutions, but things to ameliorate it?
I mean, I think everyone shares an investment in the EBBDA and wants it to continue. One of the principles of the project is paying people for their labor and making sure they're well compensated. And we're still working through what that will look like in the Fall.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of the fall, I'm wondering if you have any goals for this upcoming academic year?
So this Summer we're actually working with our amazing undergraduate research assistants and they're creating three new exhibits that we're hoping to launch in the fall. We also just revamped the site tabs. So we have more information about our method and our principles. We also have added a news and updates tab where we are planning to put new exhibits for people to check out. Part of the goal for next year is really just to upkeep the site and create metadata. Metadata has taken over our lives in a good way. We're thinking a lot about the back end and sustainability.
I know you have been pursuing your PhD at Brandeis, how has it been working at a different institution than the one that you're studying at?
I find it refreshing, honestly. Northeastern is really formative to a lot of how I identify and how I came into academia. So I think it's really nice to have connections to both institutions and also to just see the project grow. It is great to still foster the community I had when I was there and also bring new people into the conversation.
I'm wondering what your strategies are for outreach into the community. How have you identified the sort of community partners you work with?
When I was a senior at Northeastern, my capstone was on a curriculum for the early Black Boston Digital Almanac. And I reached out to my high school Facing History teacher, and she introduced me to a network of BPS people and teachers. Professor Aljoe had worked worked with Dr. Chris Madson at the John D. O'Bryant, and then, as we had more EBBDA info sessions, we started meeting more BPS teachers. W We've also connected with teachers and educational leaders at conferences, so I think that has helped get the word out. Sometimes people just email us, and that's how we get into contact as well.
What are the things that you most like about working for the project?
I have two favorites. I like working with BPS teachers, and I also really enjoy working with our team. It is so beautiful to watch them create their projects. And of course, working with Professor Aljoe, I think she's so brilliant.
WordPress is something I'm working through. We have a love-hate relationship, but we're figuring it out. We've also talked about moving to minimal computing just because WordPress, in the age of funding cuts, is expensive. We’re thinking about sustainability as well. Accessibility is always a question, as well? If you're working with BPS teachers and you want them to be able to access it, GitHub is not really as accessible.
I feel like you've definitely addressed a lot of this question, but how has working for this project shaped your journey? It sounds quite substantial.
Professor Aljoe has been a huge mentor to me since I was 18, and now I'm 26. Working with the EBBDA and Professor Aljoe has rooted me and shown me the type of scholar I want to be, and has also emphasized how important the public humanities and the digital humanities are. I found that working in community is really critical to what I want to do and how I want to do it. And access is also really important because it's not that people are not invested in academia. We should make scholarship more reachable for everyone. Working on the EBBDA has really given me the ability to strive towards that. I will say if you want to join a research project, you definitely should. It has definitely changed my life.