Jay-Z, a Gateway Figure to African American Literature & Digital Humanities

Evergreen College Art Lecture Series,

Olympia, Washington (Held virtually due to COVID 19)

May 27, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTQEnWMLrAs

Over the last decade, scholars have conceived of the “digital humanities” as a way of extending the toolkits of traditional scholarship to explore issues related to linguistic, thematic, and geographic features of literary art. Building on earlier generations of computational approaches to humanities research, I have used Jay Z as a model to structure different types of data and create an extensive dataset that reveals the interconnectivity of his music.

At the University of Texas at Arlington, I teach a course that places Jay Z within a literary continuum of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical texts by writers such as Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and even Barack Obama. My Jay Z course prompts students to expand their definitions of “lyrics” and “literature.”  In addition, this course also gives students an opportunity to work with structure various types of data to create different visualizations and graphs.