Black Literary Network

Amount: $800,000

Funding Source: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Grant Duration: October 2021 – Present

Senior Principal Investigators: Maryemma Graham & Howard Rambsy II

Co-Principal Investigators: Kenton Rambsy & Drew Davidson

Description: The Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW) seeks to build upon its Black Book Interactive Project to enhance research and public access. The objective is to create a cohesive and robust online resource, The Black Literature Network: Building Knowledge through a Digital Media Datasphere [BL-Net] for public engagement with African American literature. The main goal of the project is to transform HBW’s archive of African American fiction (the largest currently in existence) into content-rich multi-media information portals, and to make available to the user community – educators, scholars, the reading public – an accumulated body of knowledge and the linkages between and among Black literary works.

BL-Net has four principle objectives: to share knowledge, build community, expand digital corpora, and diversify the educational pipeline. Together with a large network of active scholars in African American literary studies and an affiliated community of DH practitioners, based on data derived from the HBW corpus, we will create an online resource with key innovations and diverse media. Specific products include: a novel generator machine, a literary data gallery, multithreaded literary briefs and a podcast series. We will, in addition, expand HBW’s use value with a Collaborative Resource Index (CRI) of other holdings and collections; and coordinate a workshop and professional development program for three cohorts of undergraduates and graduate student contributors. The planning and development of BL-Net by scholar-curators and professionals who work at the intersection of African American literary studies and digital humanities (DH) will ensure that we produce an efficient, functional environment for individual and collaborative work, an infrastructure that can accommodate expansion, and a model that can be replicated.