The eBlack Champaign-Urbana project is a collaborative portal on African-American history and culture that draws on multiple public and private collections of information on the African-American community in Champaign-Urbana.
eBlackCU is driven by two principles:
- Community Informatics: eBlackCU is rooted in the theory and practice of community informatics, which is "the study or practice regarding the continuity of local, historical communities meeting the transformation of information technologies," Community Informatics Research Lab.
- eBlack Studies: The second principal driving eBlackCU is eBlack Studies, developed by Abdul Alkalimat. eBlack Studies principles include:
- Cyberdemocracy: eBlack depends on everyone having access to and becoming an active user of cyber technology.
- Collective Intelligence: eBlack depends on all intellectual production being collected, analyzed, and utilized.
- Information Freedom: eBlack depends on intellectual production being freely available to everyone.
The goals of eBlackCU are to:
- Centralize information on local African-American history and culture and create new knowledge through this centralization
- Collaborate with past and present community residents in the production of knowledge by soliciting their contributions, both in the form of personal memories and in the form of digitized personal archives
- Contribute to a community of scholars, activists and citizens interested in learning more about various aspects of local African-American history and culture
- Develop best-practices for other, similar projects to build on our experiences.
