The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) is the oldest, continuously running digital humanities project working exclusively on African American literature.  Founded in 1983 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, it parallels the evolution of the field itself.  Today, thirty years later, HBW continues to engage in scholarship focusing on the study of African American literature and digital software. Below, follow links that […]

Since the study/teaching of black literature is very often dictated by what is current or what authors will attract students to a course, most of what we know about black fiction is based on a very small sample of texts.  Our objective is to learn what this larger body of mostly non-canonical texts can tell us that we don’t know and how this knowledge alters […]

Based on our collection of some 2000 novels, most of which are neither widely read nor taught, we see the digital medium as a way to provide new levels of access, consolidate a large amount of data and invite new questions. What patterns exist among book titles, word count and chapter structure of the novels? What are the terms and examples do authors use to […]

[By Kenton Rambsy] The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) focuses on African American novels published from the mid-19th through the early 20th century novels, creating a tool that allows a comparison of thematic and stylistic elements, ideas and language use. Relying on text-mining software, mapping and geo-tagging, we can make striking observations about a large number of texts. Scholars, researchers and students will be able […]