The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs (U Minnesota P: 2021), print and digital editions.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-digital-black-atlantic

Part of the Debates In the Digital Humanities series edited by Matt Gold and Lauren Klein, The Digital Black Atlantic gathers a wide group of experts in Africana studies from across the globe to consider the intersection of digital humanities and the study of African diasporas from a post-colonial perspective.  Using Paul Gilroy’s foundational 1993 concept as a way to approach the long history of “the interstices of Blackness and technology” in order to work towards “a recognizable language and vocabulary  . . . that spans the breadth of interdisciplinary scholarship in digital studies and digital humanities—including disciplines as varied as literary studies, history, library and information science, musicology, and communications,” editors Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs take “the Black Atlantic” in its broadest global sense as method and “object of study” (x).  As such, the volume offers a helpful counterpart to questions raised by Feminist Text Analysis, including the interchange between theory and practice, even as its ultimate impact goes well beyond a feminist application.  Acknowledging that this is a reductive reading, then, this book review will suggest how would-be feminist-text-analysis practitioners might find useful theoretical and practical examples in this important collection.

Grouped into four sections following Risam’s and Josephs’ Introduction—Memory, Crossings, Relations, Becomings—the twenty essays provide a range of methodologies and disciplinary areas from which to learn.  Several focus on soundscapes and music, others on mapping and data visualizations—including video representations and immersive 3D simulations, still others emphasize the need for qualitative analysis in the construction of digital knowledges and for mindfulness of community applications and engagement.   While all the pieces have something to offer feminist digital humanists, I will focus on three or four that are particularly suggestive in relation to the questions and challenges of Feminist Text Analysis raised by our course. 

Amy E. Earhart’s “An Editorial Turn: Reviving Print and Digital Editing of Black-Authored Literary Texts,” emphasizes the need to engage both print and digital media in the project of textual recovery of a minoritized group’s writings.  The essay’s focus on the limits of facsimile editions, particularly when texts and authors were under particular pressure to accommodate resistant reception, reminds us of the multiple mediations and lives of a single work and the importance of reconstructing their contexts for an understanding of the text’s potential intervention into socio-political conditions.  Using two examples of information lost in productions of the facsimile series, the Collected Black Women’s Narratives, Earhart notes how the desire for consistency, similarity, or put another way, homophilia, “conceals the ways that the materiality of the texts indicates differences in authorial authority, notions of radicalness, and even difference in the gaze on the Black female body” (34) in works by Susie King Taylor and Louisa Picquet.  She argues that a well-edited digital edition has the potential to allow “materials to be presented more fully because it does not face the space or economic constraints of print publication” including attention to color images, covers and frontispieces, as well as prefaces written by white male editors and publishers. Her final plea for making “careful editing a long overdue priority” particularly resonates for the recovery of Black female-authored texts that make up the bulk of her surprising examples of neglected works by or unremarked interventions in the texts of such celebrated writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison, including the renaming of the titles of Passing and Paradise respectively.

In “Austin Clarke’s Digital Crossings,” Paul Barrett demonstrates how “the productive acts of translation required to move between the digital and the textual and that are inherent in the digital interpretive act” (85) demand that we recognize both the promise and the limits of literary textual analysis tools like topic modeling when approaching authors like Clarke whose works exemplify the “acts of crossing” inherent in the Black Atlantic diasporic imaginary.  Revealing how “[t]hese acts of crossing . . . run counter to the intuition of topic modelling, which attempts to identify the thematic structure of a corpus and isolate themes from one another to make them readily identifiable” (86), Barrett provides a table of Topic Proportions and Topical Keywords that underline “the incommensurability between Clarke’s aesthetics of crossing and topic modeling algorithms” (88).  Rather than marking this endeavor as a “failure of method” Barrett uses it to identify the need for a “methodology of digital humanities research that emerges our of an engagement with Black Atlantic politics and textuality” (86), the need for a new set of questions, or “a need to conceive of the method differently” (88)—a self-described “reflexive approach to topic modeling” (88) which feminist text analysis at its best also advocates.  Like Earhart’s, Barrett’s close analysis indicates the consistent imbrication of race and gender identities in their textual examples: Barrett’s investigation into Clarke’s nation language and Creolization finds that “speaking in nation language is a decidedly masculine pursuit in Clarke’s work” (89).  Barrett ends by summarizing “three important dimensions of what might be conceived of as a critical digital humanities” one we might consider equally urgent for a feminist digital practice of recovery and analysis: “rendering a text worldly, resisting the positivism of computational logic by working to represent the presence of absence, and recognizing that the act of ‘making it digital’ is actually a re-formation of the text into something new” (90-91). 

Anne Donlon’s “Black Atlantic Networks in the Archives and the Limits of Finding Aids as Data” offers important comparisons between metadata applied at different times and to different archives that problematize looking for cultural network histories for specific groups.  “People researching minoritized subjects not overtly represented in collections have learned to read between the lines and against the grain to find their subjects” (168); similarly “digital methods and tools might offer increased access and possibilities for understanding archival collections in new ways, but they do not do so inherently” (169).  Donlon proceeds to chart her own experiences working with collections in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory as a case study for how to revise one’s expectations and outcomes when confronted with disparities and lacunae in the archive. She explains, “Rather than try to read these networks as representative of cultural and historical networks, I came to read them on a more meta level, as representative of how collections are described and arranged” (177).  Suggesting that “Perhaps, then, we could develop methods to read data from finding aids against the grain . . . to identify bias . . . [t] imagine new structures to describe collections” (177), Donlon extends Barrett’s “presence of absence” [op cit] to the bibliographical textual corpus itself, seeing it as well as a site for reproduction of power imbalances and the reification of prior canon-building.

Finally, Kaiama L. Glover’s and Alex Gil’s exchange, “On the Interpretation of Digital Caribbean Dreams,” offers a welcome corrective to a familiar tension between the “theory” brought by literary critics to the texts and the “tools” provided by digital designers and makers or, as Barrett puts it, “the difficult dialogue between the texts we study and the digital tools we use” (90).  Barrett’s suggestion that “dwelling in the space between the incommensurability of the text and the digital tools suggests the possibility of a worldly digital humanities practice that eschews traditional forms of humanities and humanism” (90), gains traction in Gil’s emphasis on deploying minimal computing for his and Glover’s joint project.  Rather than a division of labor in which the “dreams of the humanist too easily . . . end . . . up piped into existing visualization frameworks or . . . some D3 templates . . .  in [this] case, the interpreters made the work interesting to themselves by exploiting the fortuitous intersection between cultural analytics and knowledge architectures” (231).  By engaging “interpreters” and “dreamers” as equals rather than as “implementers” (232) and “auteurs” (231) and by resisting ready-made tools in favor of a slower but ultimately more streamlined “infrastructure, workflow, and pursestring” (231), Gil and Glover show another dimension and set of rewards for self-reflexive approaches to digital humanities projects.  Or as Glover puts it, “it involved  . . . getting me to see that there is no magic in my PC, that anything we were able to make would involve knowledge, transparency, ethics, error, and labor” (228).  Ultimately, it is the acknowledgement of those conditions that offers the best hope for a truly feminist textual analysis.

Coda on the relative virtues of the print and digital editions:

Functionality—the Manifold edition allows annotations to be seen and shared, highlighting etc. including by our program colleagues and classmates (Majel Peters!), and easy access to links to other sites and references. 

The print copy is a pleasure to read, with quality paper, legible lay-out, well-designed space, & attractive typography.  It also keeps its extradiagetical materials easily at hand, with endnotes and bibliography at end of each essay.  However, it has no searchable index, unlike the digital edition.

It should be said that the cover & opening pages and section divisions are designed for print but retained in the digital edition leading to some moments of static and illogical design.  For example, the cover’s suggestive and striking iridescent bronze lettering only comes alive with a light source or manual use and ceases to function in digital form.