A Presentation on digital humanities and our poetry dataset

On Friday, October 25, at the Penn State poetry conference, Briana Whiteside and I made presentations concerning our dataset of 208 volumes of poetry by African American poets published between 2000 - 2013. Briana, and some of my former graduate assistants, Emily Phillips and Cindy Lyles, have been developing the collection of books for years now, so we appreciated the opportunity to present on our work for an academic audience.

Briana concentrated on three key poets from our dataset: Evie Shockley, Allison Joseph, and Elizabeth Alexander. She demonstrated how those three poets link to multiple poets throughout our collection. In the case of Shockley, Briana discussed how the designs of her work are particularly distinct and outstanding in our collection.

I provided a brief overview of our collection, and I devoted the majority of my time discussing how the work on this project had, among other things, prompted my activities on becoming a poetry genius. Overall, we were really trying to extend the conversation about black poetry and digital humanities.   

Related:
• Celebrating African American Literature: U.S. and Afro-Caribbean Poetry Conference at Penn State