Black History Month UK 2025 – Resources
Black History Month UK is an annual event that celebrates the achievements of black Britons and people of colour throughout history. In order to highlight this history we’ve curated a selection of open educational resources created by our staff and students on Black History in the UK.
Centre for Data, Culture & Society
The University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Data, Culture & Society provides our community with space for methodological experimentation, innovation and skills development, and gives tailored advice and support to research groups and projects.
A Migrant’s Story: Designing Against Unconscious Bias in Digitised Historical Archives, Adam Crymble (UCL)
Who do we digitize for? Who did we forget? The age of mass digitisation of cultural heritage is behind us. From the 1990s to about 2010, billions of images, bits of paper, and even physical objects were transformed into a digital form and served up – often freely – on the web. The work was done by archivists, librarians, museum and gallery staff, historians, humanities scholars, and sometimes even enthusiasts. But these digitisers and the funders who supported them were not from a representative cross-section of humanity. They made well-intentioned choices during the selection and digitisation process, but the stories that are easiest to tell with those resources may not serve all communities equally well. To demonstrate this point, this paper considers how the digitisation of London criminal records by the Old Bailey Online could be re-envisioned to challenge rather than reinforce stereotypes of Black male criminality by changing the design of the digital archive to foreground different stories within it.
Speaker
Adam Crymble is a historian of migration and digital humanities scholar. His work considers the migrant experience and the ways that digital methods, archives, and twenty-first century culture shape the ways we can and do understand the lives of historical people on the move.
First broadcast on 12 January, 2022
ConveRACEions
ConveRACEions is a project set up by PhD students in the School of Health in Social Science at The University of Edinburgh. In collaboration with Rosie Stenhouse, Equality and Diversity Coordinator, this initiative aims to discuss and dismantle barriers to racial equality, as well as ways of moving forward.
Decolonising the curriculum, Dr Rashné Limki and colleagues
ConveRACEions with Rashné Limki, Mini Chandran Kurian, Amira Rahmat & Mally Smith: “Decolonising the Curriculum”.
Recorded in March 2021.
Watch ‘Decolonising the Curriculum’ directly on Media Hopper Create
Black European History
Prof Jill Burke, Edinburgh College of Art, considers black Africans in Renaissance Europe, particularly Italy.
|Prof Jill Burke’s staff profile|
10.2a Worlds of Wonder: Renaissance European Ethnographies
This lecture considers how Europeans understood the peoples of the new world, India and sub-Saharan Africa, showing how they lumped together these peoples in a rather imprecise way, and were curious about their difference, particularly their nakedness.
Watch ‘Worlds of Wonder: Renaissance European Ethnographies’ directly on Media Hopper Create
10.2b African Presence in Renaissance Europe
This video considers black Africans in Renaissance Europe, particularly Italy.
Watch ‘African Presence in Renaissance Europe’ directly on Media Hopper Create
Wikimedian in Residence
The Wikimedia residency is a free resource available to all staff and students interested in benefitting from and contributing to the free and open Wikimedia projects. We deliver workshops, support curriculum work and provide advice and resources to staff and students, promoting access to open knowledge across the university in collaboration with Wikimedia UK.
Our Wikimedia in the Curriculum activities bring benefits to the students who learn new skills and have immediate public impact in addressing the diversity of editors and diversity of content shared online.
|University of Edinburgh Wikimedian in Residence|
Teaching Matters Podcast: Wikimedia and History
In this episode, Ewan McAndrew, the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, is joined by Diana Paton, lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and the William Robertson Chair of History, Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, Lucy Parfitt, former President of the University History Society, two history students, Grace King and Siân Davies, and Hannah Rothmann, a former Wikimedia intern and Classics student, to discuss Wikimedia, History how the two topics are interconnected. Particularly, they discuss the Scotland Slavery and Black History Project. This episode is the fifth and final of our Wikimedia Series, which aims to recontextualise Wikimedia’s role in academia on its 21st birthday.
The conversation begins with each participant detailing what drew them to the project and its formulation. They also consider Edward Gibbon’s quote, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” While the group’s conversation revolves around the Scotland Slavery and Black History Project, it often diverges into fascinating territory regarding Wikipedia and History. Is Wikipedia a source, a source aggregator, or both? What role can Wikipedia play in documenting history’s ever-changing nature? What kind of conversations follow a project such as this one, and what conversations does it necessitate?
|Scotland Slavery and Black History Project|
This podcast was recorded in April 2022.
Listen to Teaching Matters Podcast on Wikimedia and History (Pocketcasts)
Scotland, Slavery and Black History – Wikipedia in the Classroom
This open seminar is a collaboration by Ewan McAndrew our Wikimedian in Residence with Professor Diana Paton and Lucy Parfitt at the University of Edinburgh History Society to improve public knowledge of Scotland’s Black history, and to help make Scotland’s deep connections to Atlantic slavery better understood.
“Historically, knowledge has been concentrated in the hands of the few. Marginalized groups’ histories and perspectives have been excluded by structures of power and privilege. Wikipedia revolutionizes this model, as the world’s largest, free, collaboratively-sourced encyclopedia.” (Wikimedia 2020)
Wikipedia is now twenty years old. In this time, Wikipedia has been shown to be a resource and a form of learning technology to engage with, rather than avoid. Wikipedia assignments allow students to make connections between their learning and empower them to use their digital labour to surface knowledge online to fuel discovery and build understanding globally. Students are intrinsically motivated to address problems of bias and under-representation and this presentation will discuss projects led by students at the History Society to improve coverage of Scotland, Slavery and Black History online.
In a time when many have felt disconnected and powerless, this presentation will showcase stories of student empowerment; providing exemplars of how students have engaged with, and been motivated by, researching and publishing their scholarship online in a real-world application of their teaching and learning.
Importantly, and fittingly these stories will be told by the staff and the students themselves.
Presenters: Ewan McAndrew, Professor Diana Paton, Scarlett Kiaras-Attari, Lucy Parfitt, Grace King, Sian Davies
Presented and recorded at the University of Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference 2021
Header image: Illustration by Nigel Hoare on Unsplash
