African American Cultural Networks: A Portrait of a Collecting Strength

Using network graphs to map connections among the Rose Library’s twentieth-century African American collections, the project will explore the interpersonal and intertextual connections among the collections of African American writers and artists, one of the Rose Library’s collecting strengths. I will supplement this analysis of the collections, based on their finding aids, with interviews with curators and archivists about their provenance and processing–how did the materials come to be at Emory? The graphs and this supplemental research will illustrate the literary, artistic, and scholarly communities, as well as institutional powers, that have led Emory to have such a strong, and interrelated collection of materials.

Seeing this project from start to completion will be one of the primary outcomes of my fellowship.

Read more:

• From Encoded Archival Description to Network Graphs
• Mapping Poetic Networks
• “Networks Demonstrate Collections’ Strength,” Rose Library Magazine, Spring 2016, p. 20.

Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection

The poet Turner Cassity’s papers at the Rose Library include files from his personal computer. Having gotten permission from his literary estate to make the born-digital materials available publicly online, Dorothy Waugh, Digital Archivist at the Rose Library, and I, with help from Sara Palmer, Text Specialist at ECDS, made an Omeka site to make the documents and their metadata publicly accessible and searchable: The Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection. Additionally, because Cassity’s poetry mentions many proper place names, I experimented with various methods of text analysis to map the locations in his born digital poetry, a topic which is explored in the “Places in Cassity’s Poetry” exhibit.

Read more:

• Bashing My Head Against the Command Line
• “Launch of the Turner Cassity Born-Digital Collection Site,” Emory Center for Digital Scholarship Blog.

Emory Campus History Tour

The Emory Campus History Tour presents a mobile-friendly history of the campus with images from the Emory University Archives, maps, and videos of experts on the university’s history. Built with OpenTourBuilder, the app guides users through fourteen tour stops, giving a historical overview of the location. The tour was completed in collaboration with Matthew Strandmark; it launched in September 2015.

Read more:

• Ebony and Emory
• “Open Tour Builder: Putting Emory on the Map,” Emory Center for Digital Scholarship Blog.

Other Writing

• “Making Accessible Futures,” review of the Accessible Future workshop at Emory University, The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, June 2015.
• “This Week in Digital Humanities and Pedagogy,” The Journal for Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, June 10, 2015.
• Writing Machines, Part 2, blog post on using Markdown.