Fall Quarter 2024
Theme: Black Digital Archives
3 Oct, Thursday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Reading as Archive: Navigating the Social Network of Caribbean Readers
with Schuyler Esprit
Schuyler Esprit, Lecturer at University of West Indies and Founder and Director of the Create Caribbean Research Institute, will be joining us over Zoom from Jamaica.
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In this workshop, we will explore the ways in which Caribbean reading culture in the digital age has contributed to the framing and reframing of Caribbean identity in the literary world and in broader cultural discourse. By exploring the uses of community reading forums from GoodReads to Bookstagram and BookTok, to more formal spaces of taste making such as book reviews and literary prizes, this workshop aims to reveal how digital technologies have worked to allow Caribbean writers and more importantly readers to claim and reclaim self-making and culture-making about the Caribbean from elite metropolitan publishing culture and the middlebrow literati. We will be using computational tools such as Voyant and programming languages including Python to analyze and produce critical reviews of Caribbean writing as examples of how the feedback loop of social media and digital cultures has facilitated the Caribbean reading renaissance.
10 Oct, Thursday — 4-5.30pm PST [IN-PERSON]
CESTA, Wallenberg Hall, 4th Floor, Room 433A
San and Khoi Heritage between Archive, Anarchive and Meta-Archive
with Grant Parker
Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics and African and African American Studies at Stanford, will offer a survey of recent attempts at digitizing heritage materials around the first peoples of Southern Africa, and plot what a forward path might be. At issue is the very notion of archive itself, and the ways in which traditional archives might become the basis for new, more inclusive curations.
Meredith Clark, Associate Professor of Race and Political Communication at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Andre Brock, Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech
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Christine Slaughter, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University
24 Oct, Thursday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
CESTA, Wallenberg Hall, 4th Floor, Room 433A
Black Cyberculture and the 2024 US Presidential Election
with Meredith Clark, Andre Brock and Christine Slaughter [joining us on Zoom]
From Zoom calls to TikTok memes, current digital practices are transforming the way we run political campaigns and increasing voter engagement in real time. Fundamental to these developments are Black digital spaces as both individuals and groups–including historically Black Greek-letter organizations (The Divine Nine)–use X, Zoom, etc., to bolster the Harris campaign. Simultaneously, these Black digital spaces are also opportunities for voters to negotiate questions about racial identity, leftist activism, and harm-reduction strategies, as they weigh the US government’s imperialism against the identity politics of electing the country’s first Black-South Asian, female president.
14 Oct, Thursday — 5-6.30pm PST [Hybrid]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Echoes of Harlem: Afrofuturism and Black Digital Archives
with Bryan Carter
Join Dr. Bryan Carter, Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) at the University of Arizona, as he explores the intersection of technology and Black cultural preservation in his talk, Echoes of Harlem: Afrofuturism and Black Digital Archives. In this presentation, Dr. Carter will highlight key initiatives at the CDH, including the Virtual Harlem project—a fully immersive representation of 1920s Harlem—as well as work in 3D scanning and volumetric video capture.
Drawing from these initiatives, Dr. Carter will discuss how new technologies are reshaping the preservation of African American histories, enabling future generations to interact with Black cultural narratives in very different and immersive ways. The talk will touch on the ethical considerations of archiving through a postcolonial and Afrofuturist lens and will outline a vision for the future of Black Digital Archives, where holographic figures and interactive digital artifacts are not just possibilities but realities.
Co-sponsored by Afrofutures Now
