Led by Leigh Raiford (African American Studies) and Michael Cohen (American Studies and African American Studies), this unique curatorial and archival project explored innovative and interdisciplinary ways to write and research contemporary American history, culture and political economy. Undergraduates were provided opportunities to access history via traditional historical and historiographic methods as well as through more contemporary digital means such as collection and creation of an archive for the Bay Area component of the Historian's Eye/Our Better History website.

The Historian’s Eye digital humanities project was started in 2008 by Matthew Frye Jacobson, Professor of American Studies, African American Studies and History at Yale, as a means to document the historic inauguration of the nation’s first black president and has since grown into an extensive collection of stories and images from various sites around the country. As the project has grown, regional coordinators have contributed to expand the online archive.  As coordinators of archival contributions in the Bay Area, the team has a unique opportunity to engage in an innovative and collaborative project with Yale University that promises to forge a very public place for the digital humanities at UC Berkeley. As a publicly crowd-sourced digital archive, it is also developing a model for inventive, interdisciplinary teaching, working to encourage others to record and share history in their own communities.

Students in the Research Team conducted related reading; built and authored blog posts on historiographic and curatorial method/process; and developed specific classroom assignments utilizing the website’s archive for an assignment in Introduction to American Studies AS 10AC.