"This book offers a powerful intervention in public humanities and public histories, contextualizing and offering case studies on a series of projects that fit under the rubric of what the editors call "DiCE" or "Digital Community Engagement."-- Roopika Risam , Salem State University "[The editors bring together] a diverse set of community-focused, digital public history projects that nonetheless cohere into a unified work. The case studies are immediately relevant to the concerns of community organizers, activists, and practitioners working today."-- Alexandra Werner-Winslow , Appalshop How have university scholars across a variety of disciplines navigated the co-creative and collaborative relationships involving community partners? How has the addition of digital components changed the way information can be communicated to the intended audience? Through digital projects, traditional academic silos have given way to community-based partnerships which open research, storytelling, and curation to wide array of contributors from civic engagement professionals, librarians, archivists, technology personnel, local citizens, and academics. The collaborative process may push your comfort zone and make you grapple with your roll of storytelling but as the authors of the last chapter say, "You can't make ketchup without smashing a few tomatoes." Digital projects can empower communities through collaboration and create new primary sources, collapse barriers, and spark new dialogue. Digital Community Engagement "lifts the hood" and presents nine examples of digital collaborations from constructing a public response to police violence, to creating digital stories of homelessness, to young activists united around local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for social change. Wingo, Heppler and Schadewald bring together cutting-edge campus-community partnerships with a focus on digital projects.

The case studies, authored by academics and their community partners, explore models for digital community engagement that leverage new media through reciprocal partnerships. The contributions to this volume stand at the cross-roads of digital humanities, public history, and community engagement. Rebecca Wingo is assistant professor of history and the director of public history at the University of Cincinnati. She is the coauthor of Homesteading the Plains: Towards a New History. Jason Heppler is assistant professor and digital engagement librarian at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he leads initiatives in community engagement and digital humanities. Paul Schadewald is the Senior Program Director of Community-Based Learning and Scholarship at the Civic Engagement Center of the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Public History Urban Studies Digital Humanities.