The Black Book Interactive Project

[ By: Jade Harrison ] The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) is the digital component of the Project on the History of Black Writing (HBW). A collaborative research model, it increases the number of Black-authored texts available for scholarly engagement and teaching.  Founded in 2010, based on a pilot project created by then graduate student Kenton Rambsy, now a professor at the University of Texas-Arlington, […]

The Association of African-American Museums Conference, Roots of Revolution: Reaching Back | Pushing Forward

[By: Christopher Peace] The Association of African American Museums Conference, “Roots of Revolution: Reaching Back | Pushing Forward,” took place from August 6 – 10, 2019 at the Westin Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi.   Attending this conference near my hometown in Mississippi gave me the opportunity to visit family and witness one of the most well-organized and insightful Black-centered events I’ve ever seen, complete with […]

“Characteristics of Negro Expression”: Kenton Rambsy on the Importance of Digital Humanities in the Study of African American Short Stories

[by Stefanie Torres and Jennifer Colatosi] On February 11, 2015, Hall Center Research Fellow and KU English Ph.D. candidate Kenton Rambsy presented on notable outcomes of his dissertation research in his interdisciplinary graduate research workshop, “Characteristics of Negro Expression: Digital Humanities and African American Short Stories,” at the University of Kansas. Rambsy’s work employs a digital humanities approach through text-mining software to understand African American […]

Considering and Reconsidering Black Studies: A Dialogue Between Jerry Ward and Abdul Alkalimat

In July, we shared a post by Jerry Ward on the main HBW website regarding Introduction to Afro-American Studies: A People’s College Primer (1973) and African American Studies 2013: A National Web-Based Survey (2013). This post has since invited a response from Abdul Alkalimat, primary author of both documents. The HBW Blog would like to share this dialogue and open it up for further commentary […]

Black Literature and Digital Humanities: The Black Book Interactive Project

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 […]

The Black Book Project: Why is it important?

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 […]