AFRO PWW 2’s goal is to provide access to and training for open-source digital publishing tools. In collaboration with scholars at historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), the project intends to serve as a model for those institutions, scholars, and others exploring digital publishing models for their own institutions and organizations.
The project not only reaches out to faculty and staff at HBCUs but to members of the HBCU Library Alliance, Black Studies scholars at minority-serving institutions and others.
Bringing the digital world to publications addressing Black life was inspired by decades of work by many scholars documenting the Black experience, producing exhibits and documentaries, and creating educational materials for teaching Black Studies.
The History of AFRO PWW 2 The current iteration of our project grew out of the implementation of the original Mellon-funded PWW project between 2015 – 2019, which combined formal and informal sessions at annual conferences and meetings with day-long workshops designed to give participants hands-on experiences with the open-source tools supported by the project. In addition to producing publications, the “teach the teachers” workshops were modified versions of the African proverb “Each One, Teach One”. The expectation was that participants would take what they learn back to their institutions. As with the original initiative AFRO PWW-2 will provide individual consultations for translating participants’ research into digital publication forms. It offers free support and access to tools and platforms necessary for launching quality peer-reviewed publications. The project is here to help scholars navigate the new opportunities presented by collaborative, multi-modal, and interim phase works and provide access to publishing opportunities that have been largely inaccessible in the past.