ENGL 393/AFST 393: Africana Literature and Culture: Digital Diaspora

In the 1990s we heard much of the democratization of knowledge emerging from the developing technological infrastructure, particularly the emerging internet. There was great hope that the free access materials on the web would allow those previously cut off from intellectual capitol to gain materials and knowledge that might be leveraged to change social position. As we move into web 2.0, however, it is increasingly clear that the digital divide apparent in technology clearly replicates the divisions existing in society. Projects as diverse as openJournals and the One Laptop per Child seek to address the disparities, but it is clear that many of the same challenge are alive and well in the digital age. In addition, the academic and museum communities’ decisions about what is digitized and how it is digitized continue to enforce such disparities. This is particularly apparent when we examine the way in which representative literature of the African Diaspora is digitized.This course will look at the previously mentioned issues within the context of the African Diaspora. The course will explore the digital divide within the diasporic community, looking at the way in which infrastructure issues, such as wireless and laptop accessibility, impact access to information. We will then examine the way in which cultural artifacts are digitized, paying particular attention to a diverse group of objects that represent the cultural heritage of the African Diaspora, from Literary Renaissance, to the Slave Trade, to Resistance movements. In addition to these explorations, we will consider the way in which community is both challenged and expanded with such developments

Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies

Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods—methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age

Essays reflecting on the development of the first wave of digital American literature scholarshi

Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon

This chapter argues that the new digital canon has serious elisions and losses that need to be addressed through DIY, activist projects