The Profundity of Your Archive Doesn’t Want to Live in Boxes Anymore: An Introduction to Monroe Work Today

Abstract The author goes behind the scenes of the digital exhibit MonroeWorkToday.org, a citizen’s project that was researched and produced outside of academia or formal funding. What began with an amateur’s visit to Tuskegee University Archives in 2010 led, 6 years later, to the first ever map of the true entirety of US lynching violence against all groups of people of color. The creation process collided with common issues: positionality, appropriation, interpretive body language, the ethical visualization of historical trauma, the erasure of women, and the power of digital archives.