Patterns in literary scholarship suggest that serious considerations of a literary period do not fully begin until at least a generation after its emergence. Accordingly, meaningful scholarship on African American literature since 1970 is only now beginning to slowly emerge. Scholars interested in this period face two significant challenges. First, the sheer volume of literature published after 1970 can be overwhelming, so identifying a specialty area around which to acquire deep expertise is at once critical and limiting. Second, since literary periods are themselves often nebulously constructed, developing literary histories for a contemporary period can quickly dissolve into competing contrivances, particularly if/when primary source material to document many of its ideals and common threads prove elusive.

Arguably, the clash of too much written material to claim mastery of and too little awareness of primary resources related to the desired specialty area has resulted in an unnecessary muting of key discourses that shaped this highly influential period. Digital Humanities practices, however, can help manage this challenge, thereby giving voice to these key discourses. Ultimately, Williams and Rambsy contend that data management (technology) can be an essential tool for constructing a substantive literary history with a texture reflective of the period’s ripe content and contexts. As a case in point, the presentation focuses specifically on those texts Toni Morrison brought into print as Senior Editor at Random House Publishing Company as the specialty area around which the presenters have significant expertise and for which a singularly unique literary history can be constructed.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Williams and Rambsy during their talk.

Staking a claim in collaborative models of digital archiving, exhibition and geo-spatial visualization, Sarah Patterson and Jim Casey will introduce questions, concepts and outcomes central to the Colored Conventions Project’s online restoration of the Colored Conventions Movement, 1830-1900. Working with literature and data connected to this understudied phenomenon in Black political organizing, Patterson and Casey will discuss the ways CCP’s interdisciplinary team produces narrative-centric exhibits and interactive visualizations for multiple learning communities. This presentation will especially chart CCP’s interest in tackling key questions on its journey to creating DH content for those interested in social justice pedagogies and collaborative knowledge production.

Questions of focus will include: How do we better grasp women’s instrumentality through mapping technologies that magnify their activities within historical spaces connected to the movement? How do social network analyses contribute to our understanding of Black convention leadership? In what ways do concepts of power and authority impact computing and technology-selection as the project emerges within a broader landscape of Black histo-digital studies? We seek to highlight DH praxis and pedagogies to enhance what scholarly and public audiences know about the debates, people, places and texts related to the seven-decades-long campaign for Black rights.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Casey and Patterson during their talk.

Books are primarily physical objects composed of leaves combined in sections, used as writing supports, and bound together. An increasing number of libraries, archives, and other memory institutions are investing considerable amount of money and resources in the digitization of cultural heritage; however, these efforts focus on the text, seldom covering also what material information can be recorded through photographic means. In addition, conservation is commonly considered as a discipline that is complementary—but for the most part separate—to digitization efforts, and little attention is generally given to the ways in which digitization, intended in its amplest meaning, can inform and help conservators in their day-to-day duties.

Specialized digitization efforts, such as multispectral imaging, can help us glean a considerable amount of information on the materiality of our documentary cultural heritage, allowing us to see what would otherwise be invisible to us. This information, beyond recovering the deleted texts from palimpsest membranes, can prove invaluable to conservators and their understanding of the object without interfering with its integrity. Data gathered in this manner, for example, informs conservation treatment procedures and decisions regarding the amount of light exposure a document can ‘safely’ handle

There has been considerable research on individual components—such as paper, parchment, decoration—but only little attention has traditionally been given to the book as a composite artefact. Bookbinding structures are recognised as an important source of information on the material context of books and their material culture, however, analysis in this field is still rather under-developed and tentative, mostly because limited efforts have been made so far to establish standardized analysis methodology and terminology, and to include structural information within databases to build large enough bookbinding datasets. As a product of my doctoral research I have developed an automated visualization tool producing schematic diagrams of bookbinding structures. This tool mimics the kind of drawings conservators often sketch to better understand and communicate the objects they work with, and can help recording data on the material formation of books, and communicating it with the community of scholars, other conservators, and the general public. In turn, the automated drawings can also be used as a visual data proofing tool, and as a way to test the effectiveness of description schemas.

This seminar will showcase, through some practical examples, the ways in which data gathered through digitization means can prove meaningful and useful to conservation professionals.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Campagnolo during his talk.

Could a Spotify playlist be considered an archive? How do hashtags challenge our finding aids of certain communities? Social and digital media tools and platforms have increasingly been utilized to advance community-centered approaches to archives, collections, and interpretation. These methods decolonize the archival practice and assert the presence of marginalized communities. This challenge comes as critiques such as #archivessowhite and #museumsrespondtoferguson have been pushed by professionals of color from within the field. This talk is a theoretical and practical exploration of what I call ‘radical archives’ to expand the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity. How do we as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) professionals, educators, and scholars learn from this engagement toward greater intersectionality in our interpretations? How do these radical archives bridge GLAM institutions? These social and digital media tools and platforms are utilized to interact with the archive that are not legible to the institution and confront perceptions of cultural fluency.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Ruffin during her talk.

This talk describes the discovery and significance of Etude (1967), a previously unknown work by media artist Nam June Paik identified by the author in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s recently-acquired Paik archive. Composed at Bell Labs, in collaboration with engineers, and written in an early version of FORTRAN, Etude stands as one of the earliest works of digital art—although it is not entirely clear whether Etude was, in fact, the “computer opera” that Paik mentions elsewhere in his writings, or another artwork altogether. By exploring Etude’s uncertain status, as well as the piece’s more conceptual indeterminacies—between image and code, analog and digital, and film and music—this paper demonstrates how such indefinite artifacts allow for a rethinking of the nature of the archive, cinema’s digital past, and film’s place in computational media.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Zinman during his talk.

Online space often operates within an invisible white universe with blackness becoming apparent only insomuch as it is rendered deviant. In a post-Cosby and Obama era of perceived post-raciality, black people are left to exist purely within the “dominant social imagination as media constructed stars and fantasy figures.” Black characters in popular culture thrive only insomuch as they propel the post racial fantasies of white America. Radhika Mohanram argues that the black body is only black when out of its place, for within context it is but a body. She goes on to point out from Fanon, that the black (wo)man exists to provide perspective rather than to she herself have perspective. A critical analysis of the digital culture of black and white feminist thought in Jezebel and For Harriet provides a site to examine what happens when the subject, the black body, at least temporarily does not exist as an ‘other’ but is squarely within a context that allows it to be merely a body.

Within the blogosphere there are rules of invisible whiteness that pervade online interaction. Examining whiteness as embedded within the digital culture of a blog like Jezebel is done by combining material and discursive theories of whiteness focusing on how the codes of conduct privilege white discourse, culture and values. Toni Morrison describes the invisibility of whiteness as the fishbowl that contains both fish and water. While seemingly invisible, whiteness paradoxically “may be hyper-visible as either a preferred or a threatened status”. Whiteness is only made hyper-visible through its absence in the discourse about black character by black. Critical techno-cultural discourse analysis requires us to view technology as artifact, function and belief. Therefore, to better understand technologies as cultural objects we must parse through the beliefs as articulated by users and visible in the content they produce.  In a CTDA of two blogs, For Harriet and Jezebel produced for and by women that articulate a feminist agenda. For Harriet intentionally targets black women and centralizes black feminist thought while Jezebel, a feminist blog, implicitly promotes what Mariana Ortega deems ‘white feminism’. The default status of ‘white’ is removed for white feminists who must contend with becoming deviant within the normative universe created by black women in the blogosphere.

Kishonna Gray explains “embodiment is a process rather than a given, and in order to sustain this meaning, it must constantly and continually be articulated and performed.” Black women utilize online blogging platforms in celebration and critique separate from the dominant group. As Jessie Daniels explains, “the Internet offers a “safe space” and a way to not just survive, but also resist, repressive sex/gender regimes. Girls and self-identified women are engaging with Internet technologies in ways that enable them to transform their embodied selves, not escape embodiment.”

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including links to resources and projects that Steele referenced during her talk.

In the Republic of the Imagination, Azar Nafisi champions reading as a way to open ourselves to deepen empathy and entice our curiosity. Inspired, I am developing ways of documenting and visualizing not only what I read, but also what caused me to read using linked open data. Through a custom Jekyll plugin, RDFa triples are extracted from my reading notes text files. The plugin writes JSON-LD triplets, which are then used as input for a variety of visualizations.

Tracing reading reveals the breadths and depths of interconnected themes among works that, initially, are connected simply because I noticed one influenced me to read the other. The visualizations enable movement between big-picture views of the corpus and close-readings of individual books and can reveal adjacent possibilities in themes, readings, as well as shape questions that may be currently unarticulated.

Influenced by feminist interface design, this talk will focus on the design and creation of visualizations – as finding aids, as maps into the landscape of a personal corpus.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Lindblad during her talk.