Digital Humanities & the Archives


I have conducted my research through traditional source materials from a number of collections, anthologies, and books, but most importantly, from a vast panoply of online searchable databases available for transatlantic antislavery and African diasporic scholarship: Black Abolitionist Archive, Slavery & Antislavery, A Transatlantic Archive, American Periodical Series Online, 1740-1940, North American Slave Narratives, Slavery & the Law, Slavery, Abolition, & Social Justice, 1490-2007, American Antiquarian Society, African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century, and African-American Periodicals, 1825-1995. These extensive, in-depth databases allowed for me to dive into the deep riches of abolitionist discourse, African-American publications, and black diasporic writings, and from multiple vantage points. I did so by both “distant reading” hundreds upon hundreds of boolean searches on the godforsaken slave, while also “close reading” the most illuminating sources on this transatlantic phenomenon. From a digital humanities perspective, these searches and results revealed to me that the godforsaken slave was not isolated or singular from black writers of the diaspora, and in the antislavery movement, but were widespread across many texts, writers, and genres. In this way, the trope of the godforsaken slave required a digital approach to uncover its presence, one that would otherwise have been undetectable, in scope and in content, had it been taken up through traditional means.
From 2015 to the present, I have served as a transcriber, encoder, and reviewer for hundreds of Walt Whitman’s personal correspondence and literary manuscripts, ensuring the highest quality of transcriptions were published on the critically-renowned, premier digital humanities archive, The Walt Whitman Archive, as well as collaborating with a team of Whitman researchers to produce the best possible digital humanities scholarship and public awareness.
From 2017 to 2019, I worked as a transcriber, encoder, reviewer, and data analyst on William Morris’s poetry manuscripts and book collections, completing detailed, precise transcriptions of Morris’s poetry and other writings to be uploaded and displayed on The William Morris Archive, including supporting a research team to not only publish on, but also present a variety of poetic materials to wider audiences.