Digital Humanities and African American Studies

This article is an updated version of a blog entry originally written in February 2015.

A Wikipedia Entry:

Digital Humanities is an area of research and teaching at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. Developing from the fields of humanities computing, humanistic computing, and digital humanities praxis digital humanities embraces a variety of topics, [from artificial intelligence (AI)] to data mining large cultural data sets. Digital humanities (often abbreviated DH) currently incorporates both digitized and born-digital materials and combines the methodologies from traditional humanities disciplines (such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literature, art, archaeology, music, and cultural studies) and social sciences with tools provided by computing (such as data visualization, information retrieval, data mining, statistics, text mining, digital mapping), and digital publishing.

An academic librarian and humanities scholar trained in the interpretive methodologies of English literature, I wondered how these exciting new tools were explored within the fields of African American and African Studies.  What new research questions and epistemological assumptions may AI, data visualization, text mining, and online collections engender?

A cursory Internet search yielded quite a few surprises.

According to Duke University Professor Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, the "relationship between Black Studies and digital humanities. . .  is at once precarious and filled with potential" (Terman, n.d., para 2). Neal claimed that is precarious because digital humanities scholar[s] have" been imagined as a white, male academic[s]. (Terman, n.d., para 6). Neal noted that part of the problem is that the "field . . . continues to be driven by older scholars [who are] still very much tied to a [pre-digital] 1960s style Black Studies model.

As a literacy doctoral student at Oakland University (Rochester, Michigan), I used data mining to investigate the role of literacy and literacy education in the antebellum slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Harriet Jacobs. The scholarship that informed my dissertation is largely in the 1960s Black Studies model. It is founded on print-based manuscripts produced mainly by tenure-track and tenured professors from the mid 1980s to early 2000s. I was able to use data mining techniques because the narratives themselves were digitized for the Project Gutenberg online archives.

Although much has been written about artificial intelligence and large machine learning, I am not surprised that not much has been produced about AI and African American studies. In a compelling experiment with ChatGPT, public school librarian Jean Darnell, describes misformation and racial bias in a short article generated by ChatGPT. Darnell noted that ChatGPT oversimplified African American history by omitting crucial issues and pressure points. For instance, the ChatGPT generated articled did not mention nineteenth-century African American struggles for literacy and literacy education. I assume that the large data sets used to train ChatGPT contain little to no information about that crucial part of African American history. 

Dr. Kenton Rambsy, Associate Professor, the University of Texas at Arlington, University of Kansas, discussed the implications of text mining in short stories by Edward P. Jones and other African American writers.  Using text mining software, Rambsy discovered a specific pattern of landmarks and geographical descriptions in Jones' short stories.  Rambsy claimed that Jones' frequent use of location serves as a type of geo-tagging or literary geo-tagging.

I discovered Africa Past & Present, an excellent site that features podcasts "history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora." If features several podcasts archived as digital humanities. I was particularly interested in Laura E. Seay's podcast in which she discusses her use of Twitter to document her academic work on the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"African American History", a digital humanities collection the Library of Congress, features excellent podcasts and virtual exhibitions about African American culture and history.

Overall, the intersection of digital humanities and African American/ African studies, with its challenges, seems to provide opportunities for new methodologies and theoretical frameworks within the digital humanities. I look forward to navigating this rocky terrain to contribute original scholarship to both digital humanities and African American/ African studies.


SOURCES

Alegi, P. & Limb. P. (2015, 3 Feb). Episode 89: Digital African studies Part 2 with Laura Seay. Africa Past and Present. Podcast retrieved 31 December 2023 from http://afripod.aodl.org/2015/02/afripod-89/.

Darnell, J. (2023, 30 Mar). Educator Voice: Artificial intelligence attempts Black history (and fails). PBS Newshour Classroom: Educator Voices. Retrieved 31 Dec 2023 from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/classroom/classroom-voices/educator-voices/2023/03/educator-voice-artificial-intelligence-attempts-black-history-and-fails 

                Digital Humanities.(2015, 19 Feb). Retrieved 31 December 2023 from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_humanities

Library of Congress (n.d). Digital Collections: African American History. Retrieved 31 December 2023 from https://www.loc.gov/collections/?q=African+American

Rambsy, K. (2014, 17 Jan). Edward P. Jones and literary geo-tagging. Retrieved 31 December, 2023 from Cultural Front: http://www.culturalfront.org/2014/01/edward-p-jones-and-literary-geo-tagging.html.

                Terman, R. (n.d.) Black studies and digital humanities: Perils and promise. Townsend Center for the Humanities. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 31 December 2023 from https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/blog/black-studies-and-digital-humanities-perils-and-promise