<aside> ✨ #data-visualization #black-diaspora #linked-open-data #archival-silences
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Linking the Black Diaspora with Open Data to Visualize the Void brings together datasets tracking the travels of Black thinkers, writers, intellectuals, and artists with three aims: 1) develop linked open data practices to support the development of interoperable data for Black DH, 2) apply these practices to extant datasets as a proof-of-concept for interoperable Black diaspora data, and 3) use the datasets to prototype how to visualize the absences in Black diaspora data. Through my work on the Global Du Bois and the Pan-Africanism Data Project, I have created a dataset of W.E.B. Du Bois’s travels throughout his life and eighteen datasets naming attendees of pan-Africanist events in Europe and Africa (1900-1959). A number of scholars have been doing similar work in this time period: Eduard Arriaga (Caribbean and Latin American events), Afro-Asian Networks Team (Afro-Asian events), and Kaiama Glover and Alex Gil (In the Same Boats, which includes my Du Bois data). Given the limited resources for Black DH, my project asks how we can develop data practices that allow those of us doing this work to collectively pool our datasets in a format that makes them usable to each other—and beyond Black studies. To do this, I will undertake research on linked open data, consult with experts, and convene virtual meetings of those of us doing this data work to work iteratively to develop a set of practices. Then, I will explore the feasibility of implementing the practices by working with the datasets we have previously developed and seek feedback from the others doing this work. Finally, recognizing that our work in Black DH is as much about what has been preserved in the archive as what’s not there, I will use the datasets to engage in speculative data visualization of how we visualize the absences. This is possible using the event datasets because we have total numbers of attendees, can identify how much we know and how much we don’t, and can visualize these known unknowns. In doing so, I aim to contribute to the conversation about representing archival silences for the Black diaspora.
<aside> 🧭 twitter @roopikarisam | website roopikarisam.com
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Roopika Risam is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature and part of the Digital Humanities and Social Engagement Cluster at Dartmouth College. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Her most recent co-edited volume, The Digital Black Atlantic, with Kelly Baker Josephs, was published in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at the University of Minnesota Press in 2021. Along with Jennifer Guiliano, Risam is founding co-editor of Reviews in Digital Humanities, a journal offering peer review of digital scholarship. She is also director of the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium, a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative supporting teaching and research at the intersection of ethnic studies and digital humanities. With Quinn Dombrowski, Risam is co-president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. For more information, please visit roopikarisam.com.
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