The Yale-Rutgers Black Bibliography Project (BBP) leverages linked open data technologies to encode the intersection of African American studies, descriptive bibliography, rare book cataloging, and emerging standards for modeling bibliographic metadata. Through a collaborative process, it was designed to provide a new framework for exploring and documenting Black print culture, in a way that would be both multidimensional and extensible.

This two-part presentation explores the work of outlining a rationale for Black textual criticism in the 21st century within the context of the Black Bibliography Project. The discussion will examine BBP’s methodological grounding in descriptive bibliography and digital humanities and advance an argument for a seemingly paradoxical pursuit: the systematic study of the wide diversity of Black textual production.

Speakers:

Kinohi Nishikawa, Associate Professor of English and African American Studies (Princeton)

Tim Thompson, Librarian for Applied Metadata Research (Yale)