In 1936, when the Federal Writers Project set out to record the narratives of former slaves, the participants probably could not have conceived the magnitude of what they had captured. Although flawed — the project was criticized for its power dynamics, which mainly involved privileged white interviewers putting questions to black former slaves – the results proved to be invaluable. To listen to former slaves speak of their experiences, in their own words, is to understand history and human resilience.
The Project on the History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project [BBIP], an archive of more than 1200 rare novels by Black writers, the earliest written just 15 years after slavery’s end, may be one of the most important digitalization projects after the recording and archiving of the slave narratives. Black authors writing about their experiences, often for Black audiences, may offer an authentic and less filtered exploration of Black life. As the BBIP archive has enhanced and expanded its search methods, it has become a resource for scholars outside of the University of Kansas [KU] and the University of Chicago, the collaborating institutions that have refined it. Dr. Maryemma Graham, founding director of the Project on History Black Writing [HBW], told KU’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities that the BBIP has become “more valuable to other people than it was to us.”
As a recent scholar with BBIP, I took the opportunity to speak with the scholars who lead it: Maryemma Graham, Arnab Chakraborty, a fifth-year doctoral student at KU and BBIP project manager; Sarah Arbuthnot Lendt, HBWscholar program coordinator; Hoyt Long, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago and BBIP consultant; Kenton Rambsy, professor of African American literature and Digital Humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington and BBIP consultant; Hamza Rehman, a KU MFA student and a BBIP Coordinator; Dr. Jerry Ward, Professor Emeritus at Tougaloo College and board member board of HBW; and Erin Wolfe, KU metadata library and BBIP consultant. – Rochelle Spencer
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RS: Let’s begin with orientation – please tell us about the archive.
Graham: The project’s goal is to create a database filling the gap between the materials and knowledge we have scattered access to and the big databases that are insufficiently inclusive. We need to make these texts much more available. Hathi Trust, Guttenberg, Digital Public Library of America [DPLA] — we interface with all those as we add to our corpus. Our project has been active for a very long time, since 1983, and we’ve built a collection of texts. In recent years, we realized how we could make that text much more accessible.
Long: When HBW reached out to Richard So and myself to help digitalize the collection, we were in the process of building a corpus of 20th century writing based on the most widely held novels at libraries and what was digitally available. Of the 9,000 novels from the 21st century that we collected, only 110 were by Black writers. The Chicago Text Lab (now Textual Optics Lab) joined with HBW to address these stark realities in digital culture.
Rehman: There are essentially three components to the project. First, there’s a complete digital archive of around 1,600 books. The second component is a metadata schema, which is taking information out of those books and putting them into searchable categories. And the third category is a philologic interface which has been created by the Chicago Text Lab. Philologics allow you to complete a simple keyword search within all those categories we created, or perform a keywords and context search, or a quantitative analysis for those books.
Rambsy (photo left): In January 2011, I was thinking about creating a metadata schema that we could use to analyze Black novels, so we could look at — and understand — what defined African American literature. One of the reasons we started collecting metadata about the novels is because at KU there was a ton of programming expertise using topic modeling software. But we still felt that there was not enough metadata about who wrote certain novels, during what time periods, and so forth. What this boils down to is innovative ways to study Black people and using metadata to learn about Black writers. That fundamental point has been long overlooked. That was the impetus behind all this. We only know a few Black writers, and we realized we had to create the database because there were no online records we could use. We needed a database to know who is in the canon, or really, who is outside it.
Ward: The project will enhance the study of Black writing — but not by using a highly conventional literary-historical model. Traditional academic scholarship always selects a limited number of stars. For example, Colson Whitehead and Ta-Nehisi Coates receive substantial critical attention but BBIP ensures that lesser known Black writers will be studied in the light of all that’s being recovered. Black writers should be studied in the light of all that’s recovered. It’s a new way of looking at the productivity and productions of Black people.
RS: What challenges and hurdles have you encountered along the way ?
Rambsy: This is all very expensive to achieve. So I think that’s the discovery moving forward: how often can you apply for grants? And what does this mean for — and how does this affect — the type of research you can do and how philologics can grow? The elephant in the room is obtaining the funding for labor-intensive digital projects and paying for that labor.
Wolfe: Another challenge: how to expand the information resources. We’re continuously improving the database. We’ve invested time on the project and have a large collection and robust metadata schema with over 54 categories. And still we’re asking, what can we do next?
Rambsy: It’s beneficial to talk to participants about effective ways to build. Infrastructure is important and so is sustainability.
Ward: We have to also look at the decades ahead, you know.
Long: It’s both a matter of looking backwards and forwards and trying to build a project that is going to be accessible for the very long term, long after we were part of it.
RS: Why is this program rare, valuable?
Wolfe: The metadata schema and the amount of data we’ve made searchable, the literary content of the books. This makes the collection unique. That and the details searchable in the metadata scheme.
Rambsy: This is a digital project that centers around Black literature and is directed by African American scholars. I think that’s unique in itself — since the expanding landscape of DHS isn’t really characterized by black participation.
Graham: One of the things of real value is how African American studies transform the academy. BBIP created a pipeline for new critical discoveries by examining novels that had not been subjected to extensive data analysis. The metadata schema unlocks lots of information not visibly associated with race. Diving deep into the work tells us more about literary culture and responses.
Long: It’s inspiring to see that the people involved are all at different stages in terms of their experience working with digital tools. You have people on the archival side, and you have people doing metadata curation, and folks who may not have experience with computational tools but have expertise in the primary field of research. And then you have people, like myself, who are coming from outside the field, but have expertise in large-scale text analysis. And to have all of these pieces working together and integrated in one project is, I think, what makes this such a unique digital humanities project.
Ward (photo right): This project will help older and younger scholars avoid constipation of the critical imagination. I find that what’s happening in our study of literature and culture — out of fear of not receiving the kind of credit that will help them keep their jobs, scholars are not asking the kinds of questions that could help us build knowledge and understand a larger picture, not only of African Americans and people of the African diaspora but of human beings. This project opens doors. You can use BBIP as a model for studying, let’s say, early 20th century American literature which excludes African American literature. So you’re going to study what happened in terms of Modernism, and when you do that, you’re going to come up with books that you never heard of, if they were available in somebody’s database. This is the freshness of this project.
Q: How do you make the public aware of the archive?
Arbuthnot Lendt: The History of Black Writers has a long history of scholar programs providing professional development programs for college and university faculty. And so the BBIP Scholar Program was sort of an extension of that, and last fall, we started advertising and promoting the Scholar Program. We had a good number of applicants — some people applied as teams from their respective schools, most of them applied as individuals. There are 14 great scholars in the program this year. We conducted a workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina last April at the end of the College Language Association’s annual conference. We’ve created a series of webinars, with four so far, and the fifth featuring the digital humanist Kim Gallon.
Graham (photo left): The BBIP Scholars Program is a way to bring more people into the conversation and have scholars think about ways in which they can use it. We haven’t been very prescriptive about that. So people are doing all kinds of interesting projects, but the other interesting thing is that people recognize that there is more to research. Initially our focus was on creating our own database. But our technology advanced the idea that this data should be included in the databases that already existed. So we’ll do both: have our own but we’ll also have items that make it into the other large databases that people are using now. We know people use Hathi Trust, they use the Gutenberg. They also use the DPLA. So we’re going to have to interface with all of those as we continue to add texts to our corpus, working primarily with the University of Chicago, which is exploring the idea of transfer with us.
Rehman: To gain public support, you have to focus on what has not been done and studied and examined. So far, you have a Black digital humanities department, you have people in the field. But you can’t develop if you’re still operating within a singular concept or construct. We’re making a lot of headway. We sort of moved beyond the notion of this isolated entity and have recognized the value of intersecting information.
Graham: Race is very complicated — people have been studying for years and we’re still talking about it. But what we recognize is that it intersects with lots of other things, including gender. So when we talk about metadata schema, we are intersecting lots of descriptive details that are not simply visibly associated with race, but with lots of other things. And so we’ve been doing that kind of deep dive into a body of work that doesn’t exist in other places. Because these are not the most popular texts, not the most widely read texts, nobody’s really talking about the things that tell us more about literary culture and the way people think, the responses people have over time. So it does the work that humanities does: it makes us all more aware of the broader world in which we operate.
RS: Does the archive help researchers examine questions they couldn’t query with traditional means?
Long: The keyword search has already revolutionized how we work as researchers. We’re extending this potential to a collection of novels that have thus far been excluded. The ability to put in a word of interest and see how its uses change not only over time, but also from writer to writer, builds awareness of how our thoughts have shifted. With more complex methods, we can begin to explore language across multiple instances over time and across genres, putting these findings into dialogue with findings from overwhelmingly white text collections.
Rambsy: The same types of questions have been asked across time. I think we’re just using technology to aid in our ability to answer those types of questions. We’re taking a concept called distant reading and identifying trends and divergences.
RS: Dr. Rambsy, I’m unfamiliar with “distant reading.”
Rambsy: Distant reading is a term coined by Franco Moretti and it’s been used to talk about literature. Close reading is looking at every character, every detail. Well, within a distant reading, you’re examining what types of things tend to recur between certain time periods. That’s one way to think about it … What do black writers do collectively?
RS: Any discoveries?
Chakraborty: This project came at a time when I was asking questions very similar to those Dr. Rambsy raised under a slightly different context. My mentors at the University of Kansas are scholars in environmental literature; in his book Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, the question Paul Outka was essentially investigating was: why is so much of environmentalism white? I think his book inspired me to apply that question to our collection too. The often thrown-around fact is that black people just don’t write about the environment, but I wasn’t convinced — it just seemed like an impossibility. So when I started looking into the data collectively, the one thing that really struck me is that maybe what we are calling environmentalism is not what African American communities consider environmentalism. The archives allow us to see that perhaps we never really considered a black environmentalist perspective. As Kimberly K. Smith so persuasively argues in her book African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, it’s not so much obsessed with questions about how to conserve the natural world, or how to return the natural world to its original pristine state as it is with everyone having equal access and meeting certain fundamental needs responsibly. It’s a more democratic look at the environment. And it’s revolutionary. That’s personally what I’ve started thinking along the lines of as well, and I could only do that by being exposed to some of the data collection.
Graham: We’re taking on the issue of critical invisibility. Black books exist but information about them and the way in which they’ve interacted with readers — that information doesn’t exist. We’re working to diminish an ongoing condition that pertains to virtually 90% of the books in our database. We’re talking about the history of race and racial exclusion.