#CharlestonSyllabus (Charleston Syllabus), is a

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

movement and

crowdsourced Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

syllabus using the

hashtag A hashtag is a metadata tag that is prefaced by the hash (also known as pound or octothorpe) sign, ''#''. On social media, hashtags are used on microblogging and photo-sharing services such as Twitter or Instagram as a form of user-generated ...

#CharlestonSyllabus to compile a list of reading recommendations relating to the history of

racial violence Ethnic violence is a form of political violence which is expressly motivated by ethnic hatred and ethnic conflict. Forms of ethnic violence which can be argued to have the characteristics of terrorism may be known as ethnic terrorism or ethnica ...

in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. It was created in response to the race-motivated violence in

Charleston, South Carolina Charleston is the largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston–North Charleston metropolitan area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint o ...

on the evening of June 17, 2015, when

Dylann Roof Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and mass murderer convicted of perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, in the U.S. state of South Carolina. During a Bible study at Emanue ...

opened fire during a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, killing 9 people. These texts provide information about racial violence in the United States and provide background on the history of

race relations Race relations is a sociological concept that emerged in Chicago in connection with the work of sociologist Robert E. Park and the Chicago race riot of 1919. Race relations designates a paradigm or field in sociology and a legal concept in the ...

in South Carolina in particular and the United States in general. They also offer education on race, racial identities, global

white supremacy White supremacy or white supremacism is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White su ...

and black resistance. Several of the suggested readings shed light on race and racism on a global scale. On June 23, 2015, NPR's Renee Montagne reported on

Morning Edition ''Morning Edition'' is an American radio news program produced and distributed by NPR. It airs weekday mornings (Monday through Friday) and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 5:00 to 9:00 AM ...

that "academics, librarians and history students have been rallying around the hashtag Charleston Syllabus, suggesting readings that might help inform the public of some of the city's history."

Background

Twitter campaigns utilizing hashtags to generate

lists of information sources widely excluded from academic canons emerged throughout 2014 and 2015. The most notable example of this trend is the #FergusonSyllabus, created by

Georgetown University Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...

Professor Marcia Chatelain in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising. The #CharlestonSyllabus campaign was the brainchild of Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at

Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , pro ...

. The concept came from a tweet of his: "Lots of ignorance running rampant. Folks need a #CharlestonSyllabus." Williams later stated that Roof's killing spree brought national attention to the country's history of racial injustice. Historians

Keisha N. Blain Keisha N. Blain (born 1985) is an American writer and scholar of American and African-American history. She is Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. Blain served as president of the African American Intellectual History So ...

, Kidada Williams, and others helped to circulate the hashtag and #CharlestonSyllabus started trending on Twitter by the evening of June 19, 2015. With the assistance of librarians Melissa Morrone, Ryan P. Randall, and Cecily Walker, Blain compiled and organized the reading list on the website of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Within the first day of use, the hashtag generated approximately 10,000 tweets. Librarians across the nation assisted in culling and categorizing suggestions made via Twitter, also tagging the entries in

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCL ...

, a web resource for locating materials at nearby libraries, on the AAIHS website. More than 115,000 visitors have accessed the list and several libraries across the country have featured #Charlestonsyllabus displays. Since its debut, #Charlestonsyllabus has been featured on major news outlets including BBC, PBS, NPR, ''LA Times'', ''New York Times'', and the ''Chronicle of Higher Education''. Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, and Keisha N. Blain recently edited a book based on the syllabus entitled ''Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence'' (University of Georgia Press, 2016).

Twitter Historians

The emergence of academic crowdsourcing on Twitter can, in large part, be contributed to the #Twitterstorians and #BLKTwitterstorians hashtag trends. In February 2014, the

Pew Research Center The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank (referring to itself as a "fact tank") based in Washington, D.C. It provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the w ...

defined six different kinds of network crowds, which they called "conversational archetypes", on Twitter, using

NodeXL NodeXL is a network analysis and visualization software package for Microsoft Excel 2007/2010/2013/2016. The package is similar to other network visualization tools such as Pajek, UCINet, and Gephi. It is widely applied in ring, mapping of ver ...

. The Twitterstorians channel is what the research defines as a "tight crowd network".

References

External links

* Keisha N. Blain
#CharlestonSyllabus
," African American Intellectual History Society. * Chad Williams,
#Charlestonsyllabus and the Work of African American History
," 23 June 2015, The African American Intellectual History Society Blog. * Michael Schaub,

" 22 June 2015, The Los Angeles Times. * Jeff Charis-Carlson,
Historians Work to Put Charleston Shooting in Context
" 22 June 2015, Iowa City Press-Citizen. * Daniel Rivero,
How #Charlestonsyllabus Went from a Hashtag to a Major Educational Resource in Less than a Week
," 23 June 2015, Fusion.net. * Matt Collette,
Teaching With the #CharlestonSyllabus
" 30 June 2015, School Library Journal. * Stacey Patton,
A Professor Crowdsources a Syllabus on the Charleston Shootings
" June 23, 2015, The Chronicle of Higher Education. * Chad Williams,
Why I Founded the #CharlestonSyllabus after the Charleston Shooting
" 9 July 2015, PBS Newshour. {{Racism topics, state=collapsed Black Twitter 2015 establishments in the United States Charleston church shooting