Crafting a technology of recovery: the story of the Virtual Martin Luther King Project

ABSTRACT

This article tells the story of a rhetorically informed transmedia digital humanities project called the Virtual Martin Luther King Project (vMLK). As a project that is interdisciplinary and community engaged in its development and enactments, vMLK provides a particularly rich site for examining ways to (re)shape the critical/cultural landscapes of higher education. The article explicates how and with what consequences the vMLK project functions as a “technology of recovery” and provides five implications that are significant for scholars working in the areas of public memory and critical studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology of recovery
• digital humanities
• kairos
• community engagement
• immersive experience
• transmedia

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the amazing work of Drs Keon Pettiway and Derek Ham along with our partners at the White Rock Baptist Church who together make the vMLK Project a true technology of recovery.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Victoria J. Gallagher, Kenneth Zagacki, and Jeff Swift, “From ‘Dead Wrong' to Civil Rights History: The Durham ‘Royal Seven,' Martin Luther King's 1960 ‘Fill Up the Jails' Speech, and the Rhetoric of Visibility,” in Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit Ins., ed. Sean Patrick O’Rourke and Lesli K. Pace (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2020).

2 See Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities edited by, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2016): 42–49. See also vMLK Project Team. Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project. 2019. Retrieved from https://vmlk.chass.ncsu.edu/scholarship/public-address-and-digital-humanities/.

3 Gallon, “Making a Case,” 44.

4 Ibid.

5 Gallon, “Making a Case,” 43.

6 Ibid., 46.

7 See vMLK Project Team. Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project. 2019. Retrieved from https://vmlk.chass.ncsu.edu/experience/simulation/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Council of Learned Societies: [ACLS Digital Extension Grant]; National Endowment for the Humanities: [NEH Digital Projects for the Public Production Grant].