The Anti-Racist Digital Research Institute (ARDRI) took place May 6–10, 2024. Hosted by the LSA Technology Services Digital Scholarship Studio, U-M Library, and the National Institute for Institutional Diversity (NCID), ARDRI is a mini-grant program and week-long institute that helps up to six scholars or teams take an idea for a project and develop a proposal and project plan. It provides a focused blend of workshops, guest speakers, and consultations, while also pulling together and applying frameworks from anti-racist research and digital scholarship research methodologies. Along with the week-long series of consultations and workshops, awardees are given $5,000 to fund their projects.

One of the primary goals of the institute is to improve upon the collective understanding of what it means to do anti-racist digital scholarship and digital research. To that end, ARDRI focuses on combining both anti-racist research frameworks and digital scholarship project methods and lifecycles. Awardees work to better understand anti-racist research methods and apply them to conceptualizing their projects in community with one another. ARDRI’s support includes consultations with U-M Library and LSA Technology Services staff on topics such as project workflow development; metadata, data management, sustainability, and preservation; and project infrastructure, including architecture and technical requirements for proposals, like software and hosting options.

This year’s awardees are:

• Bobby Madamanchi Ph.D. and Rachael Zuppke for “Empowering Tenants: A Digital Scholarship Project Addressing Contemporary Housing Discrimination Through Community-Centric App Development and Anti-Racist Data Science Curriculum Integration”
• Dr. Kristian D. Stewart for “Digital StoryXchange: Connecting Classrooms, Cultures, and Continents in a Displaced World”
• Dr. Odessa Gonzalez Benson for “A digital collection as narrative and visualization of the journey of resettled refugees”
• jøn kent and Brooke Troxmondo for “Riverbend Neighborhood Historical Analysis Project”
• Dr. Solomon Adera for “Uncovering History: The Legacies of Black Mechanical Engineers at the University of Michigan”
• Tam Rayan for “Al-Shatat: A Digital Archive for the Palestinian Diaspora”

For more information on awardees, see the full description of funded projects.

One awardee, Tam Rayan, found the Institute particularly valuable: "The Anti-Racist Digital Research Institute brought together a network of experts and supports that, as an award-holder, I'm excited to tap into throughout the next year of solidifying my proposed research project. I learned a great deal about funding, planning, data management, and data preservation, and more importantly, how to ground all these key aspects of digital research so that they resonate with the community I'll be working with."

Dr. Kristian D. Stewart, another awardee, shared similar sentiments: “It was a wonderful, well-organized and planned experience. The Institute brought in a ton of experts to assist our understanding of the varied aspects of proposing and a writing grant. Plus, the team at the Institute has been very helpful from the beginning in offering advice, tips, or generally just being available. Overall, I was happy to have participated.”

This year marks the first time ARDRI was run as a single week institute. A similar program was offered previously in a year-long format, but after considering feedback from participants, organizers shifted focus to the beginning phase of the projects, where guidance and support could be most utilized. While this year’s institute was offered remotely, organizers hope that next year the week-long event will be held in-person or hybrid.