DH Open Office Hours: Boston Research Center
On Wednesday September 17, 2025, the Digital Scholarship Group hosted a DH Open Office Hours event on the current state of the Boston Research Center (BRC) in the presentation space within the Centers for Digital Scholarship. Caitlin Pollock, the DSG Associate Director, and Tieanna Graphenreed, the Community History and Digitization Specialist at the Boston Public Library, discussed what BRC has achieved over the past year, what is planned for this upcoming year as the BRC wraps up its Mellon grant, and the plans for the BRC once the Mellon-funded period is wrapped up.
The Boston Research Center is a digital community history lab based in the Boston Public Library and Northeastern University Library. The goal of the center is to tell the stories of essential but underrepresented groups in Boston history. Caitlin and Tieanna started off by highlighting new members of the BRC team since late 2023, including themselves, Joel Lee, and a group of outstanding Research Assistants (Taryn Gilligan, Laurel Schlegel, Emma Beckman, and Halima Haruna). The majority of the event focused on the current status of the active projects in the BRC.
The first project discussed was Boston Black Women Lead, which was the recipient of the 2025 commUNITY collaboration award. Currently, 212 of Boston’s most admired, beloved, and successful Black Women leaders are being featured on banners stretching for two miles along Blue Hill Avenue, making this exhibit the largest public art project in the city. Boston Black Women Lead is currently attempting to create Wikipedia articles for all of these Black women; at the start of the project 116 of these 212 women did not have Wikipedia articles. Currently, there are 77 articles left to be completed. Caitlin and Tieanna pointed towards two upcoming Wikipedia edit-a-thons, one in November at Northeastern and a larger one planned for the winter at the BPL, that will help to complete this project.
The next project discussed was the Chinatown History Directory. Caitlin and Joel presented this project at the 2025 Association of Asian American Studies Conference, which was held at Boston. Caitlin and Tieanna announced that there will be a redevelopment of the CHD website coming in the next year. They then turned to a discussion of the Neighborhood Public Art project, which aims to document public art in the city of Boston, especially in Chinatown, East Boston, the South End, and Roxbury. Caitlin and Tieanna awarded a sub-grant to the ICA Teen Photography Collective to take photos of public art, which will be exhibited at the BPL in 2026. The final project Caitlin and Tieanna provided updates on was the Sidewalk Stories project. For this project, they awarded two sub-grants to Zumix and Hola Cultura, two digital storytelling community groups. There are currently four sidewalk stories available in the DRS that focus on East Boston. Caitlin and Tieanna discussed their recent community event at the East Boston branch of the BPL that highlighted these sidewalk stories. The BRC is currently working on creating publicly available sidewalk stories toolkits for any group that would like to create one.
Caitlin and Tieanna concluded the event with a discussion of what comes next for the BRC after the conclusion of their Mellon grant in mid-2026. The Mellon grant was confined to a geographic scope of Roxbury, Chinatown, East Boston, and the South End. The BRC will consider a larger geographic scope once the Mellon period is over, potentially expanding into the neighborhoods of Cambridge and Somerville to name a few. Many of the active projects are working on creating toolkits so that community members can expand upon these excellent projects.