Kinship & (Be)Longing: Confronting Slavery's Archive Through Critical Black Digital Humanities (MITH Digital Dialogue)
- To
- Hornbake Library, and Online
ABSTRACT:
In this presentation, we will share our experience working with Scholarly Editing to create a digital edition of fourteen stories centering Black and Black-Native life and humanity, which are derived from Louisiana's colonial archive.
After a brief overview of the Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL) project and our guiding principles, we will walk through the process of undertaking the digital edition, choosing the stories we have foregrounded, designing the components of our edition, and collaborating as a team to transcribe, translate, and encode the primary source documents. Our discussion will address the ways in which we have utilized, remixed, and stretched the Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines to highlight the presence and lived experiences of named and unnamed enslaved people, connecting them and their stories using specific keywords such as kinship and wellness. To conclude, we will place this micro-edition within our broader vision for the digital life of the project: a pair of interoperable static sites. As a whole, we make the case that digital scholarly editing—when guided by scholarship in Black Studies and Critical Digital Humanities—can offer a toolkit that can be adapted explicitly to confront the violence of slavery's archive and build a praxis of recovery, repair, and refusal.
PARTICIPANTS:
Jessica Marie Johnson (PI)
Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
Olivia Barnard
PhD Candidate in History, Johns Hopkins University
Leila K. Blackbird
PhD Candidate in History, University of Chicago
Ellie Palazzolo
PhD Candidate in History, Johns Hopkins University
EVENT:
Now in its 40th season, Digital Dialogues convenes prominent digital humanities, new media, and information technology practitioners to present on their field-defining research. The series invites intellectual exchange around topics critical to the digital humanities. Learn more at mith.umd.edu/digital-dialogues and follow us on social media (@umd_mith on X/Twitter & and @mith_umd on Instagram). We look forward to your participation!
