Bodenhamer, David J. ‘Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS’. International Journal of Humanities & Arts Computing: A Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 97–110. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.3366/E1753854808000207.

Bodenhamer’s article explores the potential and challenges of applying GIS (Geographic Information System) to humanistic studies. GIS could visualise multiple datasets of a location simultaneously, making it easier to compare information and spot spatial patterns of a place. Humanist works that revolve around the analysis of ‘space’—understood as a framework for examining how humans experience places, such as how investigating boundaries, diasporas, gender, race, etc. shape perspectives—could be supported by the use of GIS. Bondenhamer outlines some challenges of using GIS within this framework and discusses  how these could potentially be overcome. Ultimately, Bodenhamer views this as an opportunity to embrace ‘multiplicity, simultaneity, complexity, and subjectivity’—blending quantitative with qualitative method whilst challenging empirical supremacy through using GIS to record rich and complex voices and memories.

Brown’s article tracks how characters in McKay’s Banjo and Romance in Marseille operate under a framework of global colonial and capitalist surveillance which dehumanises them. Brown argues that in Romance, the characters are contained within spaces in a way that denies them their humanity, experiences, and feelings. She examines this through the framework of ‘exposure’; focusing on how characters responds to being under surveillance and attempts to resist it. Brown cogently analyses how Lafala is tracked by corporate agents from New York, Marseille, and even potentially, Africa. Brown’s analysis is especially potent as she compares the movement of women in Romance and Banjo with those of the men. Her examination on Aslima’s lack of mobility and choice due to her status as a sex worker—as well as her efforts to resist this—is especially salient in the section ‘Undecidability of Women’.

Brown, Susan. ‘Categorically Provisional’. PMLA, vol. 135, no. 1, 2020, pp. 165–74. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.165.

The article discusses the power and peril of classification in digital feminist literary history. The author argues that category work is crucial to realizing the potential of digital humanities for representing, analyzing, and fostering difference. The author also acknowledges the risks and limitations of digital category work, but emphasizes the feasibility and urgency of intervening critically in it, especially in the context of feminist literary history. The Orlando Project, an ongoing experiment in using semantic markup for online scholarship, is used as an example of how category work can be used to represent difference. The author also discusses other terms closely related to category work, including knowledge representation, classification, knowledge organization, epistemology, and ontology. Overall, the article highlights the importance of category work in digital humanities and feminist literary history, while also acknowledging the risks and limitations of this approach.

Cheema, Zainab. ‘Mooring Aslima: Afro-Orientalist Diaspora in Claude McKay’s Pan-Atlantic Mediterranean Modernism’. English Language Notes, vol. 59, no. 1, 2021, pp. 166–80, https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815049.

This essay examines McKay’s Maurophilia, which he circuitously refers to as “Afro-Orientalism” in his various writings. Maurophilia not only foregrounds Aslima’s associations with Spain and Morocco but also highlights McKay’s engagement with transhistorical Mediterranean diasporas, including the intra-African slave trade and Iberian Moriscos and conversos settling in North Africa following the Reconquista. This essay argues that while Aslima’s associations with Moorish-Iberian performance styles influence McKay’s modernist poetics and radical aspirations for a global pan-diasporic Black alliance, Romance in Marseille ultimately forecloses the prospect of a pan-Mediterranean, Black Atlantic globalism because of contradictions of gender and religion.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 3rd ed., University of California Press, 2011.

De Certeau’s article considers stories as ‘spacial tragectories’ and discusses the theory behind the syntax which they use. To do this, de Certeau makes several key distinctions, the first of which is between space and place. Space is the intersection of different mobile elements such as velocity, direction, and time and by nature it is unstable. Meanwhile, place is order in which things occur and two places cannot be in the same location as the elements must be beside one another. Conversely to space, place is naturally stable. A place could be a written text, for example. Overall, De Certeau argues that narration is a guide, and that through spacial stories, space is once more a practiced place. This concept is central to our project on the politics of movement. 

Drucker, Johanna. ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display’. Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 005, no. 1, 2011.

In this polemic, Druckers emphasises the need to acknowledge the subjective and interpretative aspects of data, urging a shift from viewing phenomena as ‘observer-independent’ data to ‘observer-codependent’ capta. Having done so, digital humanists then need to construct new graphical expressions which recognise the ‘fundamentally interpreted conditions’ of data construction in their ‘operation, execution, and display’.  Drucker criticises realist models of graphical expression like Google Maps and bar charts as they oversimplify and obscure the interpretative frameworks underlying statistical data. Instead, she argues for a shift from the ‘standard metrics’ used within these conventional visualisation methods, which often present categories as fixed and self-evident, to ‘metrics that express interpretation’. She provides several examples of alternative graphical expressions better suited for the purpose of humanistic study. Such metrics would explicitly acknowledge the influence of various factors such as point of view, agenda, assumption, presumption, and convention on data or, in Drucker’s term, capta. For example, when constructing maps, humanists should account for ‘subjective standpoint’ in the creation of graphical expression by clarifying the ‘point of view’ through which they are constructed.

Gregory, Ian, and David Cooper. ‘GIS, Texts, and Images: New Approaches’. Poetess Archive Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–22.

In this lecture at the Digital Humanities Conference 2010, Ian Gregory and David Cooper validate the relevance of GIS-based techniques to literary scholarship. In Mapping the Lakes, the journals of Thomas Gray (1796, proto-Picturesque movement) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802, Romantic movement) were manually typed and tagged to yield a database table that could then be matched to a gazetteer and rendered into a map to provide robust digital aid to literary close reading. In the Lancaster Newsbook Corpus, a limitation of the Mapping project is explored in the automation or semi-automation of the manual typing and tagging processes. However, Gregory and Cooper stress the importance of human intervention. Errors in automated processes are inevitable, but it is the work of digital humanists to identify and understand their sources.

Harvey, Paul, et al. Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=726688.

This book takes a fine-comb to African American Christian history and provides a detailed summary of its development from colonialist times to the present day. The development of African American music, particularly blues and gospel, are also followed given how religion and music are deeply intertwined in African American tradition and have a tendency to influence one another. Chapter 5, in particular, provides an apt narrative of the 1900s-WWII and explores the role of black women, black churches in starting deracialisation, the Great Migration and Depression alongside important figures in 1920s-1930s Harlem.

Hitchcock, Tim. ‘Historyonics: Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism’. Historyonics, 2013, https://historyonics.blogspot.com/2013/12/big-data-for-dead-people-digital.html.

Hitchcock’s article, ‘Big Data for Dead People’ is an article focused mostly on the influence the field has had on historical data analysis and research as well as how it can allow the modern researcher to examine the past with a unique perspective through potent tools that allow a thorough examination. A major portion of the text is devoted to the analysis of Sarah Durant and her arrest annd imprisonment and how it provides a unique perspective not belonging to a wealthy white academics from the era. Through analysis of various forms of data, including articles, the historical record, a corpus of language from the period, analysis of other criminal cases and Sarah’s own words during the trial, he comes to a fairly accurate analysis that the trial of Sarah Durant was likely one of the first Trials in a new age of policing and showed off flaws in a young, inexperienced system. He uses this example to elaborate on how the new methods have allowed us to experience Big Data in a variety of new ways, and how it can be used in Performing Arts, Archeology, Geography and other fields.

Hoover, David L. ‘Argument, Evidence, and the Limits of Digital Literary Studies’. Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 230–50. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb.23.

David L. Hoover’s article ‘‘Argument, Evidence, and the Limits of Digital Literary Studies’ explores the implications of using some digital humanities (DH) methodologies to find evidence in literary studies. He examines two cases where DH methods are used to analyse literary texts–arguing that they could challenge or support literary claims by producing ‘new kinds of evidence’. The first case he examines is Stephen Ramsay’s attempt at using tf-idf (word frequency) scores to calculate the uniqueness of six speaker voices in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Hoover explores potential improvements to the algorithm and suggests that the computational tractability of a premise should be scrutinised. In the second case, Hoover examines Stanley Fish’s claim that the words ‘Bishops’ and ‘Presbyters’ are arranged by John Milton in ‘Areopagitica’ to show that the two groups are similar because the “b’s” and “p’s” are phonetically close and ‘proliferate’ through the text. Hoover argues that Fish’s method is too arbitrary, citing that a text from Milton’s contemporary has many “p’s” and “b’s” as well. Ultimately, Hoover contends that DH could contribute to new types of evidence–such as positivistic evidence–being used in literary texts. However, these methods must not be too arbitrarily applied; literary critics should ask careful questions about the algorithms used and evidence collection should be rooted in ‘accepted approaches to literary texts’.

Kramer, Michael J. ‘What Does Digital Humanities Bring to the Table? – Michael J. Kramer’. What Does Digital Humanities Bring to the Table?, 2012, https://www.michaeljkramer.net/what-does-digital-humanities-bring-to-the-table/.

The post opens with Kramer remarking that databases are often restrictive and because the very nature of databases is to compartmentalise aspects and ideas, no real sense of deviation is allowed. He explores the idea of using tables to bridge the evidence to the argument and shows an example of a painting being described in a literal sense and then in an analytical. He shows the benefit of using the table like a notetaking device as it allowed the students a structure but also the freedom to expand on columns and create new ones. Kramer also questions the role of digital humanists as analysing in this way is definitely a space that could be classed as such, but warns that veering too much into just recording data rather than having this human interpretation veers more into computer science. He explains that within the class the pathways created and explored are micro-analysis, and whilst mass data has its use of course, it is by looking at the small paths that we create humanistic relations and contribute to the digital humanities field in a more impactful way or at the very least that without including it we fall into potentially dehumanizing the data that we mass-group. 

McPherson, Tara. ‘Why Are The Digital Humanities So White?’ Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

McPherson’s article reflects upon how post-war neoliberalism has created a culture of modularity that both the computational and political world adopted as their system of logic during the 20th Century. Modularity is discussed through the metaphor of a lens or lenticular object, exemplifying how through one you can only examine a certain amount of information at a time. The global time-keeping system, UNIX, is given as the primary example of how this works in practise, with machine programmes designed to only show its inputs and outputs as opposed to where the input comes from, what happens in the function machine, or where the output is going; the wider system (or kernel) as a whole is inaccessible. Similarly, modularity is discussed as an ideological tool institutional bodies and governments used to deincentivise collective, radical activism in the 1960s by separating major disputes into their own issues (e.g. student issues separated from labour issues in France) to avoid addressing the core of the actual problems: capitalist exploitation. This is an incredibly useful concept to consider in our work as our individual projects view McKay’s novel through different lenses. As we formulate our analyses, we must remain critical and open to briefly consider other lenses alongside the wider picture.

Records and Papers Relating to the French West Africa Company (CFAO) – Archives Hub. 2023, http://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb237-coll-444.

This page provides a summary of the records held in the Special Collections Hub concerning CFAO’s trading history and role in West African colonialism. It also provides a succinct biographical history of colonialism in the area by the French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British and tracks the rise of the trading company’s presence in Senegal (processing their land’s raw materials), to the influence of decolonialisation in moving the company into car distribution. Most relevant to our project is discussion of where CFAO were located in France, with the company being founded and located in Marseille before the Second World War before moving to Paris as it began its expanision into the automobile industry. There was only one other company in competition with it (West African Trading Company) and they were not located in Marseille. This narrows down the search for the trading company Falope was a part of.

Robertson, Stephen, et al. ‘This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s’. Journal of Social History, vol. 44, no. 1, 2010, pp. 97–125.

This is a sociological study on five African Americans living in Harlem via the notes kept on their probation records. These notes offer an insight into what life was like leading up to and during the Great Depression. It is unfortunate that it is in judicial reports that snapshots of these black men have been kept alive given the continued disproportionate incarceration of them in the USA. Despite this, the paper provides a detailed maps of their lives, from actual addresses to debts to the location of churches and stores. This is a very helpful read to orient one’s self around the segregated black areas of Harlem.

Smethurst, James. ‘The Red Is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century’. American Literary History, vol. 21, no. 2, 2009, pp. 355–67.

Smethurst’s article is useful for historicising McKay’s works and a good starting point for exploring scholarship on McKay beyond literary analysis. In his article, he critiques and engages with critical discourse trends surrounding McKay’s contributions to black radicalism in the twentieth century. Through examining novels that McKay wrote—including Home to Harlem, Banjo and briefly, Romance in Marseilles—in tangent to drawing from McKay’s life as a radical communist, bisexual, or gay author, Smethurst argues for an understanding of McKay’s work beyond the Harlem Renaissance lens; suggesting that his earlier works elucidates an internationalist black radicalism that extends beyond nation states.

Williams, Jericho. ‘The Snares of Intimacy: Black Femininity in Claude McKay’s Naturalist Novels’. Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 16, no. 1, 2021, pp. 97–119. MLA International Bibliography.

Williams explores how the main female protagonists in McKay’s recently published works use intimacy to “uphold autonomy and self-respect” in their patriarchal settings. It is argued that these texts ground McKay as a vastly overlooked contributor to the American literary naturalist movement and, in placing his female protagonists in storyworlds that “ensure tragedy”, he generates a complexity uncommonly seen in fictional women of the time. In the case of ‘Romance in Marseille’, it is concluded that Aslima’s intimate behaviour (the sexual, sensual and secretive) is the force that “defines [and] asserts” her identity and is the mechanism by which she survives against the “nonchalant misogyny” of 1930s Marseille. In line with naturalistic tropes, however, Aslima inevitably resigns herself to loss against the patriarchy and accepts fate to be her controller, not the outcomes of her actions or agency.

Wilson, James. ‘Harlem, History, and First-Year Composition: Reconstructing the Harlem of the 1930s through Multiple Research Methods’. Teaching English in the Two Year College, vol. 31, no. 2, 2003, pp. 122–29.

This is a paper evaluating how James Wilson, Professor at LaGuardia University in New York, taught his first year students how to approach an academic paper on the Harlem Riots of March 1935. This provides a steady overview of the salient facts behind the event that marked the end of the Harlem Renaissance as well as an exploration and eventual critique of the main lines of argument in the Riot’s legal case. Quotes from Claude McKay and references to specific streets and buildings in the “social and economic center of Harlem” are rife in here and make this paper a handy tool in situating its reader in 1930s Harlem.

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