By Nicole Gregory, contributing writer
Jamila Moore Pewu, assistant professor of digital humanities and new media in history, is working with students on a groundbreaking project that traces Orange County’s Black businesses and their history.
It all began when Natalie Graham at The Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation reached out to Pewu in 2021, suggesting that she might work with the institute to develop a mapping project to show Black businesses in the county.
“But because I come from the standpoint of really looking at placemaking, both historically and in the present, I was like, ‘Well, we can’t really understand where the businesses are today, and why they’re here today, and in what context they’re here unless we understand historically what had been here,’ ” said Pewu, who is a digital historian and previously worked at the Museum of African American history in Boston.
Pewu leads many digital humanities initiatives in the CSUF history department and is the director for the Mapping Arts OC project — a digital map of public art and underrepresented artists in Orange County.
Pewu decided to engage her students in the research project, which they called #Networked OC, to document the past, present and future of Black-owned businesses and community organizations in Orange County. They quickly discovered that traditional methods of research don’t often apply to Black history.
“When they started this project, students were used to going to the usual sources. They went to the library, to the archives, to the databases. And they kept coming back saying, ‘There’s nothing. I can’t find anything,’ ” Pewu said. “And that is very much the case — there isn’t much in the usual archive that tells you about Black Orange County.”
So they began collecting their own data. “We started off doing interviews with current business owners,” Pewu explained. “Then we did some historical research looking at census records. And in…
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