While I was on sabbatical this past academic year, I was working on a new book. It's going to be called The Archive Writes Back: Minoritized Literatures and the Digital Textual Paradigm. Earlier this spring, I sent out the first three chapters and a proposal, and was fortunate to receive an advance contract on it.
I've still got some more writing to do, but below is a detailed description of the project. It is essentially an encapsulation of the past ten years' of digital humanities / digital collections work I have been doing. In addition to sharing what I've learned from doing these projects, I'm aiming to ask a bigger question about how and whether the turn to digital text will change how we think about and teach literature. (I think it can and should -- in fact it's already happening, though thus far most people teaching in the humanities haven't really started to think through the paradigm shift we're experiencing.)
The Archive Writes Back: Minoritized Literatures and the Digital Textual Paradigm
Digital Humanities scholarship has had a major impact on humanities scholarship across a range of areas, from digital archives and collections to the emerging field of cultural analytics. Specifically, the advent of electronic text in its many modalities reopens fundamental questions in the fields of book history and archival studies, while also inviting entirely new areas of inquiry related to the status and identity of the text and the evolution of printed as well as digital texts as technologies and instruments of power and authority. However, thus far few scholars have attended to the implications of the digital textual paradigm for minoritized literatures in either the U.S. or the Global South. Does the prospect of increased access to previously marginalized voices through digital collections change not just what we might read but how we read?
More broadly, The Archive Writes Back asks: How can we use digital humanities approaches to the text and the archive to center the voices of marginalized communities, in order to facilitate both the recovery and transformation of knowledge in literary studies?
Drawing on many extant DH projects as well as the author’s own experience curating digital collections such as African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology and The Kiplings and India, The Archive Writes Back argues that digital collections should be understood not merely as textual repositories but as critical interventions, enabling recovery of marginalized voices but also a more fundamental transformation of the reader’s relationship to the text. The design features of digital collections—including metadata, tagging schemas, maps, and visualizations—can illuminate networks amongst minoritized writers and editors, and explore contexts inaccessible through traditional print forms. Digital collections can also merge the functions of print anthologies with those of textual corpora, thematic databases, as well as institutional archives. These points of confluence can allow new ontologies of the digital text to emerge, with transformative implications for minoritized writers as well as for the literary Canon more broadly. Alongside digital collections, the building of inclusive textual corpora can serve as a framework to enable deep research and discovery on topics of general interest; the vast body of texts first described by Margaret Cohen in 1999 as “the Great Unread” -- and now widely invoked by DH scholars working with large corpora – can be unpacked and assimilated as new knowledge by human curators and readers.
Digitally collecting, curating, and annotating writings by minoritized writers – both within the U.S. and in the Global South – helps to correct absences and omissions in the cultural record, what I, building on the work of DH scholars like Lauren Klein and Roopika Risam, have referred to elsewhere as the “Archive Gap” (“Beyond the Archive Gap” [2019]; “The Modernist Archive Gap” [2024]). Amplifying and extending recovery efforts that were pioneered in the 1970s-80s in print-based scholarship, this work aims to use digital scholarship to bring marginalized voices to light. Digital collections can serve as spaces for original knowledge production, specifically under the rubric of an enriched account of literary history. Finally, digital collections oriented to minoritized writers can help document and validate the experience of identity formation that allow many minoritized communities to emerge on their own terms as part of the cultural mainstream. We see this with African American writers in the early 20th century as well as with Asian American writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These dynamics can also be explored with emergent minoritized communities outside of the U.S., such as contemporary Dalit and Adivasi writers in South Asia. Thoughtful digital collections can give readers guideposts to terminological debates, the emerging use of community-chosen ethnonyms and advocacy frameworks, and important cultural context and background.
Minoritized communities have been subject to a long history of exclusion, omission, and mainstream ignorance, which digital scholarship can help to remedy. The pattern of exclusion begins with absence from prominent, field-defining anthologies; published work by minoritized authors also tend to go out of print more often, leading many readers to depend on substandard print-on-demand or archaic editions. Some works are deemed too controversial for publication during authors’ lifetimes, and are either directly censored or subject to self-censorship. Finally, the aforementioned pattern of exclusion and omission means that minoritized writers are often excluded from classroom syllabi, often because of lack of access to texts. Digital collections can remedy many of these omissions in part simply by providing access to carefully edited and annotated primary texts of out-of-copyright works. However, alongside access, digital collections can also transform the landscape of literary history in more radical ways, through the emergence of new digital paradigms of textuality, specifically the turn to indexicality (which implies searchability as well as database file structure), as well as visual textual modalities (i.e., the map and the network).
While the focus in The Archive Writes Back is mainly on the impact of these innovations for minoritized literatures, the conceptual framework posed here has implications for textual studies more broadly. The shift from linear to indexical access is a phenomenon scholars have been addressing since the advent of hypertext in the 1990s, though it has in some sense accelerated in the era of large language models. Alongside these are emergent textual interfaces that change our mode of accessing the text, including maps, network visualizations, and text-to-speech technology. These new paradigms of textuality in the digital era have followed and probably accelerated changes in how knowledge is visualized, as well as the relationship between technologies of the text, technologies of the archive, and access to power. Along those lines, in the introductory chapter of The Archive Writes Back, I engage with scholarship in digital textual studies by scholars like Leah Price, Naomi Baron, and Andrew Piper, who have theorized the implications of electronic text encoding.
Alongside the new paradigms of digital textuality mentioned above, texts curated and presented online can also be rendered and interpreted as data (or datasets) for computational research. Here, too, ethical approaches are important, so that data is not used to further dehumanize or re-marginalize already precarious communities or individuals within those communities, a phenomenon scholars particularly in feminist, Black, and Indigenous DH scholarly communities have warned of. Information scientists as well as scholars associated with DH have argued that data needs to be understood as the product of human curation and as a representation of human choices as well as subject to ethical and epistemological limits. Moreover, datasets are more effective and persuasive when their provenance, methodology, and cultural contexts are transparently identifiable, accompanied by thorough documentation (sometimes described as the data essay).
Specifically with minoritized literatures, the turn to data can be valuable in documenting the extent of past harms (what Earhart has referred to as “digital literary redlining”). However, new modalities of the digital text can also contribute to the reformulation of the concept of literature in the digital age, an era defined by the prevalence of social media platforms, crowdsourced knowledge, vernacular criticism, and algorithmic search and suggestion interfaces. Digital Humanities methods for classifying, interpreting, and discovering texts – methods that work with algorithms rather than against them – might play a key role in revitalizing literary studies for the 21st-century technology landscape.
Drawing on many extant DH projects as well as the author’s own experience curating digital collections such as African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology and The Kiplings and India, The Archive Writes Back argues that digital collections should be understood not merely as textual repositories but as critical interventions, enabling recovery of marginalized voices but also a more fundamental transformation of the reader’s relationship to the text. The design features of digital collections—including metadata, tagging schemas, maps, and visualizations—can illuminate networks amongst minoritized writers and editors, and explore contexts inaccessible through traditional print forms. Digital collections can also merge the functions of print anthologies with those of textual corpora, thematic databases, as well as institutional archives. These points of confluence can allow new ontologies of the digital text to emerge, with transformative implications for minoritized writers as well as for the literary Canon more broadly. Alongside digital collections, the building of inclusive textual corpora can serve as a framework to enable deep research and discovery on topics of general interest; the vast body of texts first described by Margaret Cohen in 1999 as “the Great Unread” -- and now widely invoked by DH scholars working with large corpora – can be unpacked and assimilated as new knowledge by human curators and readers.
Digitally collecting, curating, and annotating writings by minoritized writers – both within the U.S. and in the Global South – helps to correct absences and omissions in the cultural record, what I, building on the work of DH scholars like Lauren Klein and Roopika Risam, have referred to elsewhere as the “Archive Gap” (“Beyond the Archive Gap” [2019]; “The Modernist Archive Gap” [2024]). Amplifying and extending recovery efforts that were pioneered in the 1970s-80s in print-based scholarship, this work aims to use digital scholarship to bring marginalized voices to light. Digital collections can serve as spaces for original knowledge production, specifically under the rubric of an enriched account of literary history. Finally, digital collections oriented to minoritized writers can help document and validate the experience of identity formation that allow many minoritized communities to emerge on their own terms as part of the cultural mainstream. We see this with African American writers in the early 20th century as well as with Asian American writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These dynamics can also be explored with emergent minoritized communities outside of the U.S., such as contemporary Dalit and Adivasi writers in South Asia. Thoughtful digital collections can give readers guideposts to terminological debates, the emerging use of community-chosen ethnonyms and advocacy frameworks, and important cultural context and background.
Minoritized communities have been subject to a long history of exclusion, omission, and mainstream ignorance, which digital scholarship can help to remedy. The pattern of exclusion begins with absence from prominent, field-defining anthologies; published work by minoritized authors also tend to go out of print more often, leading many readers to depend on substandard print-on-demand or archaic editions. Some works are deemed too controversial for publication during authors’ lifetimes, and are either directly censored or subject to self-censorship. Finally, the aforementioned pattern of exclusion and omission means that minoritized writers are often excluded from classroom syllabi, often because of lack of access to texts. Digital collections can remedy many of these omissions in part simply by providing access to carefully edited and annotated primary texts of out-of-copyright works. However, alongside access, digital collections can also transform the landscape of literary history in more radical ways, through the emergence of new digital paradigms of textuality, specifically the turn to indexicality (which implies searchability as well as database file structure), as well as visual textual modalities (i.e., the map and the network).
While the focus in The Archive Writes Back is mainly on the impact of these innovations for minoritized literatures, the conceptual framework posed here has implications for textual studies more broadly. The shift from linear to indexical access is a phenomenon scholars have been addressing since the advent of hypertext in the 1990s, though it has in some sense accelerated in the era of large language models. Alongside these are emergent textual interfaces that change our mode of accessing the text, including maps, network visualizations, and text-to-speech technology. These new paradigms of textuality in the digital era have followed and probably accelerated changes in how knowledge is visualized, as well as the relationship between technologies of the text, technologies of the archive, and access to power. Along those lines, in the introductory chapter of The Archive Writes Back, I engage with scholarship in digital textual studies by scholars like Leah Price, Naomi Baron, and Andrew Piper, who have theorized the implications of electronic text encoding.
Alongside the new paradigms of digital textuality mentioned above, texts curated and presented online can also be rendered and interpreted as data (or datasets) for computational research. Here, too, ethical approaches are important, so that data is not used to further dehumanize or re-marginalize already precarious communities or individuals within those communities, a phenomenon scholars particularly in feminist, Black, and Indigenous DH scholarly communities have warned of. Information scientists as well as scholars associated with DH have argued that data needs to be understood as the product of human curation and as a representation of human choices as well as subject to ethical and epistemological limits. Moreover, datasets are more effective and persuasive when their provenance, methodology, and cultural contexts are transparently identifiable, accompanied by thorough documentation (sometimes described as the data essay).
Specifically with minoritized literatures, the turn to data can be valuable in documenting the extent of past harms (what Earhart has referred to as “digital literary redlining”). However, new modalities of the digital text can also contribute to the reformulation of the concept of literature in the digital age, an era defined by the prevalence of social media platforms, crowdsourced knowledge, vernacular criticism, and algorithmic search and suggestion interfaces. Digital Humanities methods for classifying, interpreting, and discovering texts – methods that work with algorithms rather than against them – might play a key role in revitalizing literary studies for the 21st-century technology landscape.