Dr. Synatra Smith, former CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation, sat down with Christa Williford, CLIR’s Senior Director of Research and Assessment, to chat about her fellowship, her career, and current projects. This interview was conducted in June 2025. Content has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Tell us about your CLIR postdoctoral fellowship. You were a joint fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and Temple University Libraries.

I did a lot of different things in terms of digital library and digital archival skills. It started with a Wikidata project where I was updating the Wikidata pages for Black artists in the [Philadelphia Museum of Art]’s collection. And in order to do that I would write a blog post that had a citation list, and then cite the blog post. It helped create a stronger relationship between the artist and PMA, and also provided an opportunity to show where I got all the information about the artist. We also ended up doing a joint project between the two institutions, a joint Wikidata “editathon,” and brought in some Wikipedia editors to help with that. So we did a lot of work with Wikimedia. And then eventually this evolved into more of an extended reality (XR) experience. So I made an augmented reality mobile app for the iPhone about public art by Black artists throughout the city. Philadelphia is known as “Mural City,” so I also worked with Mural Arts Philadelphia on that, and I worked a lot with the African art collection that is at the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection that’s a part of Temple University Libraries. 

Next, I turned a Black woman-owned bookstore in Philadelphia named Harriet’s Bookshop into a VR environment. Basically, I went and took measurements, created it, learned how to use the 3D modeling software in the process and then used Unity to build an actual VR experience that’s interactive and everything. It brings in a lot of the research I did with the Black artists in the PMA collection, the public art, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection objects, and African art from the PMA as well. So a lot of little different pieces to make this dynamic experience, and really just to see what’s possible in VR when it comes to museum collections.

How did your experiences as a fellow shape the direction your career has taken?

My, my, my! I still think to myself, I am so happy I did this fellowship because it completely changed everything. I had just been working in the education department of a small Black museum in Maryland, and now I work for the State of New Jersey. I’m a project manager for the historical markers that are going up at Black heritage sites throughout the state. But one thing I got to bring with me is the augmented reality skills. So we are doing something called a virtual museum with select sites. A lot of our sites are tied to an actual institution, a museum or something like that. But a lot of them are also just–there’s no building. There’s nothing there. It’s just going to be a historical marker to say what was here. So we’re activating those sites with more information by creating a mobile, augmented reality experience. You just scan a QR code that’s attached to the marker pole, and it launches the augmented reality experience. We’re calling the collection of these augmented reality experiences a “virtual museum.” We did our first one already with the Franklin Street School down in Cape May, New Jersey, which was a Black school because of segregation. And now it’s a library. So they’ve got a small exhibit there, but we also did this AR experience attached to the marker pole. So I’m working on those. 

Then, even bigger than that, [my former fellowship colleague] Portia [Hopkins] and I have created a business with another colleague of ours. We’ve been able to do research projects initially, and we’re wrapping up a couple of those now. But we’ve come to realize that what we really love is activating spaces with research and extended reality. So we were working with the Pauli Murray Center down in Durham, North Carolina, and we did a speculative scrapbook which was really cool to bring Pauli Murray’s oral history to life through visual means that included actual archival photos, but also photos that are either AI-generated or something like that, just to kind of bring the experience to life a little bit more, because, of course, there’s not visual documentation of everything. We also created a “choose your own adventure” interactive fiction experience. And I was able to learn how to do that because–thanks to the postdoc–I participated in Dream Lab at University of Pennsylvania twice…and [in] the second [session] I did creative coding, and we learned about Twine. So I was able to take that skill into that project.

We also did some other stuff that’s a little bit more analog. We’ve come to the understanding that there are people who are interested in technology and people who are not–different learning styles. So we kind of try to make sure that our approach is multi-generational, that it includes no tech, mid tech, and high tech: high tech being VR, no tech being obviously things that have nothing to do with technology, and everything in between.

Now, we’re expanding into looking for other opportunities to do this work in other projects. I’ve kind of fallen in love with this type of work. So I’m looking for many, many more opportunities to do this down the road.

Is there any other project that you’re working on that’s really exciting to you right now?

There is. We just started working on this project. There’s not a whole lot to say about it yet, but we are working on processing and digitizing the Congressional papers for the late Congressman John Lewis, which is really, really exciting, and we found out about this project because Jenn [Garçon], who was our postdoctoral mentor, found out about it, and asked us if we were interested. So it still was like CLIR helping us along the way. It’s been a phenomenal ride, to say the least.

I also ended up getting an award in 2022, from the Association of African American Museums. It’s called the Pace Setter Award, and it’s for folks within the first 10 years of their career who are doing amazing things in the Black Museum field. While I had already been in the field a couple of years before starting the postdoc, I think my work with the postdoc is what really launched me to be eligible for that award, and someone had to nominate me. I still don’t know who nominated me, but whomever it was: Thank You!

Dr. Smith now serves as the project manager for the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Black Heritage Trail.