A Colony in Crisis after Five Years

“Konbit” is an expression in Haitian Creole that means to work together, collaboratively, to achieve a desired outcome. Haitian Studies scholar and digital humanist Marlene L. Daut interprets “konbit” to mean not only analog but also digital collaborations. Working together with undergraduate and graduate students, independent scholars, archivists, librarians, digital humanists, historians, and literary scholars we have created and maintained A Colony in Crisis, a digital history project about colonial Haiti, for the last five years. The Colony in Crisis project sprang from our desire to get digitized French revolutionary pamphlets, which had not seen much use, into the hands of undergraduate students. In consultation with Dr. Jen Guiliano, right here in MITH, we planned out a site that would serve up translated excerpts of key pamphlets, along with historical background, much like an online document reader. The site now includes 3 issues of translated pamphlets, background notes written by undergrads as a class assignment, and Haitian Creole translations, with accompanying audio. This talk will discuss how the concept of “konbit” has been incorporated into our work on A Colony in Crisis, specifically in our classroom interventions and collaborative working arrangements. In this presentation, we will share lessons learned and future plans on the site’s 5th anniversary and beyond.