In the 21st century, digitizing historical documents and engaging digital history has served as both a new opportunity to engage history and expand its reach. Since 1990, when features on encoding and teaching history with databases were first published in Perspectives, the American Historical Association has sought to attend to the expansiveness of history and archiving in the digital age; reckoning with the obstacles, challenges, and immense potential of digital history. Digital history can democratize and make history more equitable by opening access to historical documents and resources once guarded by institutional affiliations, while simultaneously producing new considerations on preservation, uneven access, and infrastructural support. Participants in this roundtable would argue, despite these challenges, that with the persisting uncertainty of the present administration and its growing involvement in controlling certain narratives within U.S. history, digital history and digital humanities projects are increasingly crucial to combating linear narratives. Thus, this roundtable asks: How do digital humanities projects or digitization continue efforts to democratize and make more equitable histories presently targeted by this administration? How is digitizing an act of justice?

This roundtable highlights current and upcoming digital history projects centering justice. Since 2009, Matthew L.M. Fletcher’s (Michigan Law) Turtle Talk blog has served as the leading blog on legal issues in Indian country by making legal materials and primary source documents open access for tribal lawyers. P. Gabrielle Foreman (Penn State) is the founding director for the Colored Conventions Project, an interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life. Alaí Reyes-Santos's (Oregon Law) The Healer Project showcases interviews with healers and traditional ecological knowledge, ethnobotanical guides, and curriculum and bibliographical resources simultaneously engaging in the decolonial act of theorizing in conversation with those sites of knowledge production. Finally, William G. Thomas III (Montana State) historied engagements with digital humanities and history projects stems from his previous positions as Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia and Co-PI of the University of Nebraska’s U.S. Law and Race Initiative’s forthcoming open-access educational resource. Together, they will discuss the role of justice in their digital projects, posit how historians can digitize as an act of advocacy and equity, and attend to the nuances of our archives, institutions, and the nation.