Eric Gonzaba, associate professor of American studies, was awarded a 2026 ACLS Digital Justice Development grant. The American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice grant program supports digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the program also prioritizes projects that bolster the local ecosystem of digital humanities at their academic, community and cultural heritage institutions, thereby creating opportunities for scholars, especially those within historically underfunded fields, to pursue innovative, diverse digital scholarship.
Gonzaba’s project, “Expanding Queer Cartographies: Mapping Lesbian Travel Guides,” will digitize and map approximately 27,500 women-friendly and lesbian-friendly venues from Gaia’s Guide (1975-92). Working with LGBTQ+ archives and community advisers, the project will integrate this data into “Mapping the Gay Guides” to create a national, comparative map of lesbian and gay male geographies across multiple decades.
The expanded dataset will support a multi-decade comparative spatial analysis of lesbian and gay male geographies, enabling scholars to examine how LGBTQ+ communities and spaces evolved across the United States over time.
“Expanding Queer Cartographies” is one of seven established projects that received ACLS Digital Justice Development grants of up to $100,000. Grantees will have the opportunity to collaborate with the Nonprofit Finance Fund to develop a long-term financial plan for their projects.
“From our most competitive and disciplinarily diverse pool of applications to date, the projects funded this year represent the breadth of what ACLS imagines ‘digital justice’ to entail,” said Keyanah Nurse, senior program officer of intentional design for an equitable academy programs. “Novel methodological frameworks such as histofuturism, community-centered uses of tools such as LiDAR scanning, and critical interventions into questions around data sovereignty contribute to the program’s orientation toward restorative and reparative justice practices.”