#myshawu was a first-year writing based student project I created and managed at Shaw University. These images provide a glimpse into a 1600-image archive and public-facing campus history project. From 2013-2015, I created #myshawu as a prototype for teaching writing through student-generated social media images that archive campus life. The proof-of-concept application utilized North Carolina State University Libraries’ open-source application Lentil. Students used their mobile phones and the social media platform Instagram to document their experiences at Shaw University, the South’s oldest Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Founded at the end of the Civil War and an important locus of the Civil Rights era, including the birthplace of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Shaw University’s history became a resource by which students could compose their present and re-engage that history through their own mobile networked multimodal compositions.

The #myshawu project created a form of praxis, a way for students to document and transform social and educational experiences through producing and circulating images that connected Shaw’s past with students’ present lived experiences. Over its two-year run, this project broadened and extended to include new cohorts of students and ancillary projects, like student-conducted oral histories from former Shaw University presidents and notable alumni. The #myshawu project speaks to the potentials of large-scale social media-based projects for circulation-based writing theories and pedagogies, community building, campus history archiving, and student-led undergraduate digital humanities projects.

The code for the website is available on Github.

This project was presented at the International Digital Humanities Conference (University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 2014) and the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference (University of Pennsylvania, 2015). Additionally, the project was featured in a 2015 Digital Library Federation Forum on Social Media presentation by NCSU Libraries.