Recent years have seen an exciting convergence between work on Black-authored texts from the nineteenth century and digital projects in the twenty-first century. Such projects go beyond expanding the canon to consider the very idea of “books” expansively, encompassing a wide variety of black-authored texts including newspapers, speeches, minutes from colored conventions, and self-published pamphlets that mix history with song. Taking advantage of the affordances of the digital, these projects move beyond recovery work to embrace interactive engagement. They model collaborative scholarship between library workers, undergraduates, professors, and community members using strategies like crowd-sourcing transcriptions or lesson plans for creative classroom projects.

This panel, representing projects at various stages of “completion,” will share successful strategies, discuss funding challenges, and brainstorm new approaches.

Featured Image citation: Lee, Jarena, 1783-, “Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee,: Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel.,” Black Self-Publishing, accessed May 13, 2021, https://www.americanantiquarian.org/blackpublishing/items/show/10975.

Moderator: Kevin Wisniewski, Director of Book History and Digital Initiatives, American Antiquarian Society.

Projects:

Black Self-Publishing (BSP), represented by Elizabeth Watts Pope and Kevin Wisniewski, is a collaborative research project based at the American Antiquarian Society (@AmAntiquarian) that lists books by early African American authors that were or may have been self-published. Future expansion of the prototype site may include digital editions, full bibliographic descriptions, and evidence of printing and distribution.

Center for Digital Black Research (@DigBlk), represented by Shirley Moody-Turner and Kristin Moriah, is a public-facing, project-based digital research center, and home to the Colored Conventions Project, Douglass Day, and the forthcoming Black Women’s Organizing Archive. Through collaborative, public, and scholarly projects, #DigBlk brings the buried and scattered histories of Black organizing in the long nineteenth century to digital life.

Colored Conventions Project (@CCP_org), represented by Curtis Small and representatives from the Center for Digital Black Studies, uses innovative, inclusive partnership models – including community and church engagement – to locate, transcribe, and archive documents related to the nearly forgotten history of nineteenth-century Black collective organizing.

Just Teach One: Early African American Print (JTO-EAAP), represented by Brigitte Fielder, encourages folks to “just teach one” lesser-known early African American text by providing a high-quality digital copy of the primary text, contextual information, lesson plans, teaching reflections, images, and more.

Scholars:

Brigitte Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is (with Jonathan Senchyne) co-editor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African-American Print (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) and author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2020). She is currently writing a second book, on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for (often simultaneous) humanization and racialization.

Kristin Moriah (@DarkStars_) is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens University and a partner with the Penn State Center for Black Digital Research. Her research interests include Sound Studies and black feminist performance. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center.

Shirley Moody-Turner (@docmoodyturner) is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University. She is a founding co-director, with Gabrielle Foreman, of the Center for Black Digital Research and the soon-to-launch Black Women’s Organizing Archive. Her works focuses on recuperating often buried forms of nineteenth and early twentieth century Black women’s intellectual, literary, and social activism. She is the author or editor of four books: Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation, Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (with Lovalarie King), African American Literature in Transition 1900-1910, and the forthcoming Penguin Portable Anna Julia Cooper. She is currently at work on a biography of Anna Julia Cooper.

Curtis Small (@CurtisSmall) is a librarian and coordinator of public services for the special collections department at University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. In this position, he coordinates the reference, instruction and exhibition programs, and also serves as a curator for the rare book collections. In 2017, Curtis curated the exhibition Issues and Debates in African American Literature at UD Library. In 2019, he was a co-organizer of the Black Bibliographia conference, also at University of Delaware. As a proud team member of the Colored Conventions Project, Curtis works on permissions and outreach. He has also done scholarly research on the print history of the Colored Conventions Movement and the importance of Haiti within the movement. Curtis also works to increase racial diversity among professionals in the fields of archives and Special Collections. He holds a PhD in French from New York University and an MLIS degree from the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University.

Elizabeth Watts Pope is curator of books and digitized collections at the American Antiquarian Society. She works to connect people to their history by providing access to printed and digitized sources, especially focusing on under-documented groups. Elizabeth has presented widely on early American subjects including black self-publishing, Hawaiian printing, and women’s commonplace books. She has an M.A. in History from the University of Connecticut.

Kevin Wisniewski (@projectorperiod) is the director of Book History and Digital Initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society. He manages the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC) and coordinates efforts to create and maintain digital access to collections and to foster partnerships with the larger academic community. Wisniewski previously taught in the English Department at the University of Maryland. He holds M.A. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Baltimore and a Ph.D. from UMBC.