Publication

Digital East St. Louis, a project supported by a National Science Foundation ITEST grant, is a collaboration between Southern Illinois University’s STEM Center and the IRIS Center for the Digital Humanities to design programming that encourages newfound interest in technology via a place-based approach to the digital humanities. I serve as the project’s curriculum director, alongside STEM’s Instructional Designer Matthew Johnson and English Professor Howard Rambsy.

The informal educational program provides participants in grades six - nine in real life (IRL) experiences as they tell the stories of their city. East St. Louis, Illinois, and its surrounding towns are located on the American Bottoms, a flood plain directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. East St. Louis was a bustling site of industry and culture, but the city has suffered from white flight, the exodus of job-creating businesses, and pollution. Digital East St. Louis participants, however, think the city has a different story to tell, involving the jazz trumpet of Miles Davis, the dance technique of Katherine Dunham, and a tight-knit community that comes together for football games and arts performances. One participant explained, “People think that East St. Louis is a bad place and that there’s nothing here, but I like the project because we get to show people who don’t live here that there’s more happening than just the bad things they hear about.”

Participants have recorded oral histories of residents at the Community Center. They have compared images of the city’s parks in virtual walking tours and filmed documentaries about its best restaurants. They used Google My Maps to map their finds from soil and water testing and used iNaturalist to record biodiversity in the area’s state park. The content drives student interest and digital skills follow. They contextualize content on an Omeka archive. Along the way, students have learned about metadata, the basics of GIS, web design, and how to record and edit sound and video.

The key to Digital East St. Louis is that process, rather than product, becomes the primary site for community engagement. Rhetoric about digital spaces often describes them as removed-from-the-world places we go to to while away hours and siphon our ability to interact civilly and intimately. I’ve tried to counter this perception in the design of digital projects so that as content creators, participants engage with the community they seek to represent. In Coding for Community, participants leave their comfort zones to talk to new people about the city’s past and its future, explore neighborhoods on foot, and delve into old postcards and letters. As they do so, they have a greater sense of their digital audiences and the story they hope to share with them. In this way, the project participants have come to see they have some agency in reframing the narratives that circulate about their city and that they can have a meaningful impact on its inhabitants.

Jessica DeSpain is Associate Professor of Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the codirector of the IRIS Center for the Digital Humanities. She is the editor of The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, a project comparing the over 170 editions of Susan Warner’s bestselling American novel over a hundred-year history of publication. She recently coedited a collection of essays titled Digital Pedagogy and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press’s Topics in the Digital Humanities Series. She has published several articles on digital humanities pedagogy within and beyond the traditional classroom. She created the curriculum for SIUE’s Digital Humanities and Social Sciences minor, and she teaches several courses wherein students balance humanities content with DH methodology.