The Black Book Interactive Project

Amount: $40,000

Funding Source: National Endowment for the Humanities

https://www.culturalfront.org/2016/07/toward-history-of-black-book.html

Grant Duration: May 2016 – October 2017

Project Consultant & Lead Researcher

BBIP addresses the lack of metadata designed to reveal the significance of African American cultural heritage materials through the use of data mining and visualization approaches. Doing so requires that we also analyze the durability, efficacy, and relevance of existing tools in order to develop a working model for data mining within African American literature collections. This project identifies 44 fields to describe 100 African American novels available in digital archives. The 44 fields allowed data sets specific to research questions that field specialists might ask.

The negligible number of African American (AA) literary texts digitally available for scholars working in the field of digital humanities remains a persistent problem. The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) responds to this critical digital invisibility by proposing to create a metadata schema that accounts for race, to make these archives more discoverable for scholarship. Using 75 novels from the Project on the History of Black Writing digital archive, we will produce a demonstration project that increases access to little known AA texts, encourages and enables text mining as a digital practice, and bridges the current gaps in computational research in literary studies. Our goal is to expand the community of users and practitioners and to make this schema a standard for the interactive exploration of similar digitized collections.