This presentation discusses the conceptualization and development of interactive cartographic platform In the Same Boats: Toward an Intellectual Cartography of the Afro-Atlantic. In the Same Boats is a work of multimodal scholarship designed to encourage the collaborative production of humanistic knowledge within scholarly communities. Comprising two interactive visualizations that trace the movements of seminal cultural actors from the Caribbean and wider Americas, Africa, and Europe within the twentieth century Afro-Atlantic world, the platform seeks to push back against the ways in which “Global South” intellectual production has been stubbornly balkanized in the academy, its limits and contours largely determined by imperial metropoles. The project charts the extent to which Caribbean, African, Latin American, European, and Afro-American intellectuals have had opportunities to be in both punctual and sustained conversation with one another: attending the same conferences, publishing in the same journals and presses, active in the same political groups, perhaps even elbow-to-elbow in the same Parisian cafés and on the same transatlantic crossings – literally and metaphorically in the same boats – as they circulate throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and beyond. Leveraging the affordances of digital technology to facilitate a literal retracing of hemispheric black studies, the project draws attention to multiple sites of potentially interconnected Afro-Atlantic theoretical and creative production. Easily accessible, visually impactful, and content-rich, the combination of these two visualizations proposes a generative resource for twenty-first century scholarship concerning the long-historical impact of Afro-Atlantic figures across a vast networked geo-cultural space.

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

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, was founded in 1965 to microfilm Benedictine libraries in Europe. The project grew rapidly beyond its monastic and European focus. In 2003, HMML began to use digital imaging technologies to document the manuscript heritage of ancient Christian communities in the Middle East. Starting in Lebanon, the project soon moved into Syria, Turkey, Iraq, the Old City of Jerusalem, and followed the historical progress of Mesopotamian Christianity as far as South India. HMML’s pioneering microfilming efforts in Ethiopia in the 1970s were resumed in a series of projects that included the Abba Garima Gospels, the oldest known Ethiopic manuscripts, and a first venture into Islamic manuscript digitization in Harar, an historic center of Ethiopian Islam. That step, followed by an invitation to work with the major Muslim family libraries of Jerusalem, prepared HMML to undertake leadership in digitizing the vast collections of Islamic manuscripts rescued from Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012, just before the famous desert city was occupied by Islamist forces. In addition to the project in Mali, HMML teams and partners are currently working in Croatia, Egypt, Iraq, Jerusalem, Lebanon, Malta, Ukraine, and Yemen.

In this presentation, Columba Stewart will explain how a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota became involved in such a massive effort to document cultural heritage; describe the challenges of data management and workflow; and present HMML’s online environment for manuscript studies, vHMML, which includes a Reading Room that will ultimately offer almost 100,000 complete digitized manuscripts to scholars around the world. HMML is now partnering with the Roshan Institute on projects to digitize, describe, and share Persian manuscripts endangered by conflict and environmental challenges.

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

Knowing when and where people came from within Africa, and when and where they went in diaspora, is a major research question affecting the history of the continent and the broader Atlantic world. My proposed solution is to initiate the process of creating the framework to standardize Africa’s geo-political history. Creating a broadly-accepted core of knowledge about the geographic, political and migratory history of Africa along a cartographic timeline will provide new insight, methods and solutions to research transformations to the continent, but also the origins of people absorbed into the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the history of the African diaspora. This talk will examine the current state of Digital Humanities in the discipline of African and African Diaspora History by focusing on approaches, strategies and challenges to integrating a proposed project called “West Africa Historical GIS” with the Liberated Africans Project, which will reconstruct widely dispersed archival evidence from a transnational collection of primary sources made by some of the world’s earliest international human rights courts.

These combined projects examine the enduring interest in the memory of slavery through evidence that allows rebuilding the life histories for tens of thousands of Liberated Africans throughout the Atlantic World. The long-term outcome will be a dynamic website to explore the history of antislavery and international human rights law, as well as the demography of the post-1807 trans-Atlantic slave trade, principally from the perspective of the Africans involved.

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