Building Digital, Archival Research Skills for Timeless Storytelling
Graduate student Kayla Blanchard has had two graduate assistantships at the College that have strengthened her skills and her desire to share the stories of people who have often been overlooked.
Although Kayla Blanchard attended high school in Charleston, it wasn’t until she came on a tour as an undergraduate history major at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, that she learned about the slave market located in downtown Charleston and saw the fingerprints of enslaved children in the bricks around the city.
“I remember the feeling of being somber and crying,” says Blanchard. “It made me think about the willpower and self-determination of the enslaved community because there is a big silence. I was disappointed I hadn’t learned more about their history when I was in high school and made it my mission to study more about the state so I can share their story and spread awareness.”
With that mission in mind, Blanchard decided to pursue a master of arts in history at the College of Charleston. As a first-generation university student covering expenses on her own, she was grateful for the financial support she received through the Karen Chambers Fellowship and graduate assistantships.
Digital Storytelling
Her first year, Blanchard won one of the competitive graduate assistantships with the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. Now in her second year, she has continued her work with LDHI.
At LDHI, Blanchard began working on a project that brought her full circle: the digital exhibit by her Queens University undergraduate professor and mentor, Caroline Grego. Based off Grego’s book, Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South, the exhibit tells the story of Sea Island communities’ recovery efforts after a devastating hurricane.
The exhibit was the biggest mapping project the LDHI – which relies on graduate students to build out features like the map – has ever taken on. For Grego’s exhibit, Blanchard did the lion’s share of the calculations and data analysis and helped build out each map point. She also painstakingly conducted image research and then drafted layout options for images and text.
“Kayla worked hard to ensure the exhibit is accessible and approachable,” says Leah Worthington, digital projects librarian at the Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library. “We used the data sets she created, including the number of houses and miles of roads and flood-prevention drainage ditches rebuilt, to demonstrate the results of the labor of the community – definitely not typical historian’s work.
“It’s always cool to see students stretch their brain in a new direction, to think about how quantifying a community’s labor can increase a story’s impact on the public,” she adds. “Kayla tapped into how to use data to present the power and strength of Sea Island communities in a way that captures a deep sense of historical empathy.”
Sharing the story of how the Sea Islands communities rebuilt after the 1893 hurricane through technology fed into Blanchard’s desire for people to see the full picture.
“Kayla’s openness and drive led to a lot of growth in her technical and research skills,” says Worthington. “She has a whole new way of sharing history that is real-world applicable and will certainly open up career opportunities.”
From the Archives
To build her skills further, Blanchard began working as a graduate assistant at the College of Charleston Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.
There – under the mentorship of Ashley Dennis, assistant professor of history – she is conducting archival research for an exhibit that commemorates the Avery’s 40th anniversary.
The exhibit will be both physical and digital – and the work on the physical exhibit is opening Blanchard up to a whole new way of sharing information with the public.
“Kayla is working on two very different projects for her graduate assistantships – one archival and one digital – in two separate spaces of the College,” says Dennis. “It’s rare to operate in that capacity, but – given her expertise in African American history and her knowledge of Avery – she was the logical graduate assistant for the project.”
In addition to her work with the Libraries, Blanchard has expanded her ability to share stories by getting certified as an interpretive guide through the National Association for Interpretation and joining the Black and Brown Interpreters Network. BBIN was founded by Erica Veal, project archivist and interpretation specialist at the Avery Research Center.
Using her experience as an interpretive guide, Blanchard wrote a tour for the Seashore Farmers Lodge Museum and Cultural Center focusing on the African American perspective for her Introduction to Public History class.
Blanchard’s network of people – particularly from the Department of History and the Libraries – who share her passion for telling the story of Africa and African Americans in the Lowcountry, combined with the technical expertise she has acquired at the College, provide her with a solid foundation for sharing the stories of a people in history who have often been overlooked or ignored.
