Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: Recuperating Forgotten Narratives II

On May 16th, 2024, as part of the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Series, The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University, Ayesha Hardison (University of Indiana, Bloomington) talked about the work of digitizing and making accessible the history of Black writing, as texts and recordings are collected, curated and transformed from an archival project to data and digital texts, sounds and visuals. Previous seminars in our series have attended to divisions, but also possibilities, engendered by data along various fault lines and contexts (from 19th-century statistical thinking to biases in archives, from the challenges of quantification to the history of data governance). With this seminar on ‘Recuperating Forgotten Narratives’ we focus on what happens to text when it is digitized and turned into data. What new possibilities open up with this type of textual data? What new narratives can be written about past and present textual traditions? What remains irretrievable?