Black Press Research Collective

In a little over a decade, historical and contemporary black newspapers have been digitized at a rapid rate. Yet a critical body of scholarship of these newspapers’ impact continues to lag behind the technological developments, which have made these newspapers available to scholars and students.  This dearth, in part, results from insufficient digital tools, which assist researchers in understanding the geographic scope and social magnitude of the Black Press.  The Black Press Research Collective (BPRC) is a portal for print and digital resources and scholarship about the historical and contemporary Black Press in Africa and the African Diaspora.  Its main focus, however, revolves around the United States. Using open-source digital tools to develop maps, graphs, charts and other visualizations, the BPRC recovers the history of the Black Press and transforms it into a visual and multimedia narrative of the African American experience in the United States.  This discussion will reflect on the processes involved in the recovery of African American and African Diasporic history using technology and compare it to the methods used in English to recover African American literary history.