Sheshat: A Howard University Digital Humanities Initiative

Amount: $100,000

Funding Source: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

Co-Principal Investigator (Dana Williams, Maryemma Graham, Kenton Rambsy)

Grant Duration: January 2016 – January 2017

While there have been a handful of Digital Humanities (DH) projects on the slave narratives and other topics in African American history and culture, there is a visible absence of such projects in African American literary studies, as evidenced by the annual international Digital Humanities Conference, where one rarely sees anything on race, let alone on black literature. To help fill this void, “Sheshat: A Howard University Digital Humanities Initiative,” a year-long project that generated new DH data in African American literary studies and introduced faculty members to DH tools and techniques that enhanced teaching and learning in the humanities and beyond.   The project, developed in collaboration with the College Language Association (CLA) and the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW),  (1) digitized the first fifty years of College Language Association Journal (CLAJ) and select African American novels and (2) redesigned four existing humanities division courses that will be designated as DH specific and offered each semester at Howard University (HU).