Echo Lab is an open-source API project designed to support research, education, and creative work rooted in Black intellectual traditions. It provides structured, machine-readable access to curated data about Black historical figures, cultural texts, social movements, and foundational ideas.

This API is built for the Black Digital Humanities community — a flexible backend that can power visualizations, apps, bots, syllabi, and beyond. Whether you’re building a timeline, a citation tool, or a digital exhibition, Echo Lab offers a common layer of data to build upon.

The internet is full of information — but little of it reflects Black thought in structured, relational, and developer-friendly ways. Echo Lab isn’t just a database. It’s a resonant engine:

• A tool for remixing history
• A foundation for interdisciplinary collaboration
• A method of preserving Black study as living infrastructure

We don’t just document memory. We create the systems that help it echo forward.

Echo Lab organizes content using a growing semantic network, currently built around five core entities:

• figures — Scholars, artists, activists, theorists
• titles — Foundational texts: books, essays, speeches
• concepts — Core ideas like "invisibility" or "freedom"
• movements — Social, cultural, or political movements
• organizations — Key institutions and collectives

Each entity links to the others using shared identifiers, forming a relational web that reveals the interconnected nature of Black thought across history.

Echo Lab exposes a RESTful API via Express that allows you to query and filter each entity:

GET /api/figures
GET /api/figures/:id

GET /api/titles
GET /api/titles/:id

GET /api/concepts
GET /api/concepts/:id
GET /api/concepts?tag=freedom

GET /api/movements
GET /api/movements/:id

GET /api/organizations
GET /api/organizations/:id

Each endpoint returns structured JSON formatted for extensibility and clean integration with frontends, data visualizations, and educational applications.

Echo Lab also includes a server-rendered frontend built with EJS that allows users to explore relationships between entities in the browser.

Example routes:

• /figures/:id — shows a figure’s biography + linked titles/concepts
• /concepts/:id — visualizes a concept and its connections
• /movements/:id — introduces a movement with contextual figures and texts

The views are fully modular and can be extended with new visual logic (e.g. timelines, maps, network diagrams).

Each object type in Echo Lab uses a shared relational schema:

{
    "id": "racial-uplift",
    "term": "Racial Uplift",
    "definition": "A 19th-century movement advocating for the moral, educational, and social advancement of African Americans as a collective strategy for progress.",
    "category": "political",
    "titles": ["iola-leroy"],
    "figures": ["frances-harper", "w-e-b-du-bois"]
}

All relationships are tracked using id values. Figures are always referenced using figureIds, while other linked entities use plural field names for now (titles, concepts, movements, organizations). A future update will normalize these to *_Ids format.

Planned features include:

• Advanced filtering by tag or time period
• Embeddable JS widgets for public history use
• PDF exports for syllabi + classroom use
• Graph visualizations (concept maps, figure clusters)
• Versioned data snapshots for digital citation

Echo Lab is in active development and welcomes collaboration from:

• Scholars in Black Studies / African American Studies
• Developers working in open data or cultural infrastructure
• Designers interested in UI for history, theory, and narrative
• Educators creating digital-first classrooms

MIT License. Built for learning, remixing, and educational use.

Echo Lab is not just a codebase. It’s a digital method. A slow archive. A cultural infrastructure. A way of saying: Black memory has structure. Black ideas have continuity. And digital tools can help them resonate.