Interview with Libby Collard and Odile Jordan from Mapping Black London
Libby Collard and Odile Jordan are both Research Assistants for Mapping Black London and PhD students in History at Northeastern University London.
Libby and Odile spoke with Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, about their work with Mapping Black London, how their personal scholarship has been shaped by the experience, and the public responsibility of making maps. Their comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Colleen: Let’s start off with some introductions. Could you describe how long you’ve been at the project?
Libby: I’m Libby Collard. I'm now a final year PhD student in History and both Odile and I have been working on the Mapping Black London project since January 2022. We both started as undergraduate research assistants. It was meant to be a three-month contract where we were tasked with reading the Letters of Ignatius Sancho to map all of the people and places that he mentions to create a digital map of Sancho's London.
Odile: I’m Odile Jordan, and I’m a second year PhD student in history. At the start of the project we were doing much more hands-on archival work and doing the data processing. I think we have since shifted to a broader intellectual role where we do a lot of brainstorming and talking about the plans and direction of the project.
Oh, wow! I didn’t realize you both had been on the project since the initial Ignatius Sancho’s London mapping project. I would love to hear more about that experience.
Libby: It was an amazing three-month project. We were both undergraduate students and didn’t have any hands-on archival experience. Both of our first trips to the archive were because of this project, even though I was doing a history degree. The project introduced us to a range of different skills and experiences which we’ve now taken into our PhD projects.
How did Ignatius Sancho’s London become Mapping Black London?
Libby: In May 2022, we launched the Ignatius Sancho map. At the project launch, the team from the London Archives (formerly the London Metropolitan Archives) were in attendance at the event and they were putting on an exhibition called Unforgotten Lives set to run the following year. Through a collaborative process of co-production we began researching for the exhibition and decided to expand our scope from Ignatius Sancho’s London to Mapping Black London.
Odile: The experience of witnessing Mapping Black London and its scope grow so exponentially over a short four years has been such a privilege. It's been an eye opener for me in terms of what the results can be when the ambitions of universities, like Northeastern, are directed towards international collaboration. I feel like we often see examples of it not quite working, so it's been a very positive experience to see it come into fruition and produce such positive outcomes.
That’s great. I’ve been at Northeastern since 2017, and I actually worked for the NULab when the Ignacio Sancho project was just starting so it is really great to hear about the trajectory of all that. You both began working on this project as undergraduates and are now both in your PhD programs. How has Mapping Black London shaped your personal journeys?
Odile: I was not a history undergrad, I actually studied philosophy, so I had to swap disciplines to work for the project. But I had a personal interest in Black British history and it seemed like a good opportunity when the job listing came around. And I liked it so much and it was such a nice experience that I decided to do a PhD in history. I'm focusing on the Asian migrant presence in 19th century London.
Libby: My PhD research looks at the African presence in London during the long 18th century, so it fits within the scope of the Mapping Black London project. Both our PhDs are attached to the wider project, but they're also our own independent studies. I think that's a lovely and unique position because our PhD projects started with Mapping Black London, but now we've developed the expertise to go off on our own paths.
Odile: Both Libby and I work with quite innovative methodologies. We do a lot of digital mapping, which is obviously in the name of Mapping Black London, and that's something that Libby and I are now both exploring in our own projects. A big part of that conversation means asking how we push these methods to their limits. What can we do with them that feels like a fresh contribution to the digital humanities? It's been quite ambitious, both the aims of Mapping Black London itself and our own projects.
I know this is a large project. For my sake, how many people are involved and where are they?
Libby: We have co-PIs on either side of the Atlantic, Oliver Ayers, Professor of History, in London and Nicole Aljoe, Professor of English and Africana Studies, in Boston. Our project manager, Dr Renée Landell, was brought on just over a year now. We have labs in both London and Boston and over the years have had around 10 undergraduate and graduate research assistants between the two labs.
How did the aims and goals of the project evolve when the project became Mapping Black London?
Odile: The initial reason, I would say, behind our focus on Ignatius Sancho at the beginning was that he is one of the few Black British historical figures who left a very large amount of writing behind. And that's quite a rare occurrence. Sancho wrote a huge amount of Letters that were collected and published after his death. So it was a well-delineated, 4-month project that was focused on this one collection of primary source material. It made sense to focus on Sancho very tightly and to enter the larger conversation of Black British history through him and his writings.
When we began collaborating with The London Archives, we started working with other Black figures, in a broader period. Our reason for wanting to increase our scope in that way had a lot to do with moving beyond the stories of extraordinary and historically privileged Black British figures: those who had a platform, those who had wealth, those who were helped by others and who had social mobility in their lives. That’s not something that was accessible to everybody at the time. We were considering what it meant to just focus on those extraordinary figures. Do we end up replicating a historical bias, where somebody who already had a platform is further spotlighted? We were thinking that it actually might be very productive and maybe even more interesting, in some ways, to focus on the more common experience of people of colour in London, including those who weren't wealthy or were criminalised or enslaved.
Libby: I agree with Odile, I think it is the shift from looking at an individual to looking at more of a collective Black experience that sums up the project’s expansion. Also, the exhibition was looking at African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous people of colour so we really expanded our scope in terms of who was included.
When we first started this project we always considered how this was going to translate to a broader audience. Our first maps that we created had an academic focus. When we started working on the exhibition, we thought, how can we make this still scholarly but also accessible to the public? The exhibition prompted us to figure out how to combine those two things. I think that expanding from Ignatius Sancho’s London to Mapping Black London allowed that to happen, and now one of the big aims of the project is public engagement and outreach.
Yeah, that’s really great. I’ve always found that of all digital methods, maps are particularly appealing to the public and they force you to think critically about public engagement.
Libby: I think it gives us a responsibility as well, as we need to make sure the public can engage with the maps in a meaningful way. For example, one thing we tried to do initially with the map for the exhibition was to show the Black presence in the city on a timeline. The exhibition covered hundreds of years, from 1540 through to 1860. We quickly realized the timeline was actually quite misleading – the timeline showed a big spike in numbers followed by a notable decline shortly after, not necessarily because Black people were leaving the city but rather because the availability of sources differs so much across those periods. This sort of thing encourages us to think about what responsibilities we have as academics, to add nuance and context to the maps to help public audiences understand what the maps are actually telling us.
What are the main goals for Mapping Black London this year?
Libby: About a year ago the Mapping Black London project entered its current and third stage. The first stage was the Sancho project, the second stage was the exhibition with the London Archives, and now we're in a third stage where we're working with the school curriculum.
The undergraduate research assistants are taking the research that the project and our PhD RAs have done and turning that into classroom materials. If you are a teacher, you can go on the website and download teaching materials from the educational materials page on our website. Renée was brought onto the project to oversee and coordinate this school curriculum work. It's really nice to see our academic research being piloted in schools in London. The pilot happened in late December, so we will use the feedback this year to improve and expand our materials.
Odile: This third phase that we're in is all about outreach. Like Libby said, we are working with schools and educators who are in need of toolkits or vocabularies that help them teach Black history. A central part of our mission is to make sure that this content and this history is being taught to kids. A lot of it is just not being prioritised at schools and we think that that's a shame and it's important for that to change.
The other side of this outreach phase is more community-focused. One of the ways that we do that is through collaborations with parish churches. There's a few churches that come up in our research quite a lot as places where a lot of people of colour and Black people were visiting or were connected to in some way. One very fun way to engage with that history is to actually get to know the current people in the congregation at those churches. Saint George's-in-the-East has been an important one for us. Libby and I have been along to a few community days where we get to share a little bit of our research, show them some maps, and engage in a sort of co-creation of their local history, if you will. What else is there to add, Libby?
Libby: We're planning on doing an exhibition with the two churches we're working with: St. George-in-the-East and Saint Anne's in Limehouse. Both of them are interested in the kind of model that we used at the London Archives. Similar to what we’re doing with the schools, we are trying to create a blueprint that could be replicated on a wider scale; some sort of co-created toolkit where churches around London could use the data that we and the London Archives have collected to showcase their own history to the current congregation and parish members. The undergrad research assistants are working on creating exhibition materials for those churches right now. There is a lot of academic work to do with a PhD, so it’s great to also be very involved in public facing work. I’ve learned a lot from engaging with the communities whose histories we are researching and I think that’s really important.
I would love to hear more about the process of acquiring these parish records. What does that look like in practice?
Libby: The digitised parish records are crowdsourced. It's volunteers from the community who search through these very difficult-to-read and expansive baptism records to find entries relating to people of colour.I've searched some of these records myself and it is hard work. I've done a couple of very small scale churches in very specific years and even that takes days and days and days. I hope that the public outreach that we're doing is benefiting the community, but equally we learn so much from them, so it's very much a collaborative process. We are very indebted to all of the volunteers who have spent time finding these records for us to analyse in our PhD projects.
It is really interesting how the project has developed to be consistently more public-facing over time. It has been great getting to hear about the work this project has been doing. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
Libby: I think the only other thing I would say is it truly has been a very global experience getting to do this project. You hear a lot about how a PhD is going to be a lonely and isolating journey. I think we've had a really lucky experience of working on a research project and continuing that work in a PhD, which means our work has been so connected. It has meant that even though I'm doing this PhD by myself, I feel as if I do have people both in Boston and here in London who really care about what we're doing. It has made my postgrad experience much more collaborative and interdisciplinary.
Odile: I was going to echo that and say that the academic community aspect of this has been such a gift. It really does make all the difference in terms of your mental health and the more sustainable approach that you can take to your work. It's just that much easier and more enjoyable when you have other people around you who are on a similar journey as you.