From Dataset to Interpretation

By Jade Harrison

Identifying patterns requires careful observation, analysis, and the aggregation of large amounts of data, but interpreting what those patterns mean requires textual analysis, contextualizing, and describing the deeper meaning of trends that emerge.

Gabriella Pardlo, a member of our Data Ranger team, imagines the possibilities that open up when we use literary analysis to contextualize numerical trends across 300 short stories, noting that the archive we are creating, “allows people to make widespread connections. They can easily examine the writing techniques Black authors lean on in order to be successful.” 

Rather than analyzing one individual Black writer’s approaches to character representation, dialogue, and settings, combining the data annotations and analyzing them as whole allows us to identify overarching patterns across the stories and make connections between writers from the 1880s to the 2020s. I find that color-coding by annotations for a story before organizing my exploratory findings into an accessible data sheet helps ensure that my critical interpretations of characters, spaces, and spoken exchanges remain grounded in close reading.

When reviewing multiple annotated stories together, I begin to notice patterns in character dialogue, including gendered trends in who speaks and receives the most dialogue and the locations where these exchanges take place. The gendered dynamics of which characters speak and receive the most dialogue in early-20th-century Black women’s fiction, for instance, shifts in the late 20th century with the increased visibility of Black women writers. Pattern recognition is only the first step of literary analysis, because those findings are meaningless without literary analysis and contextualization to understand the diversity of themes, genres, characters, and geographical locations that Black writers create in their literary artistry.

In my work, quantitative patterns reveal how often and in what tones certain types of characters speak and receive dialogue during spoken exchanges, but literary interpretation allows me to contextualize these findings to show how they offer significant insight into how writers depict voice, agency, and emotional interiority in Black fiction.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Genre Sensitivity and Annotation Decisions

By Jade Harrison

Black writers work across a range of fictional genres, and because each genre follows different conventions, annotating Black short fiction requires flexibility when gathering context about characters, settings, and dialogue.

Lyric Hoover, a member of our Data Rangers team, has observed that “Black speculative writers often remain more race-neutral than non-speculative Black writers, mentioning character race only sparingly, if at all,” which points to the wide variances between Black writers and the conventions they use to create fiction. The use of rigid coding categories when annotating Black fiction comes with limits, especially given the wide range of genres that Black writers engage. To address these challenges, we established a structured coding system for annotating by creating resources such as a controlled vocabulary and a data dictionary that offer broad but concise terms and categories capable of capturing the nuances of characters, settings and space, and dialogue across genres while maintaining consistency.

Black speculative fiction writers create otherworldly settings, may introduce characters who are not human, use unknown time periods, or purposely obscure descriptive information such as race, age, and gender, requiring annotators to think even more deeply about what types of spaces are being presented, who qualifies as a character, how to determine historical context, and how to code information when characters’ unique identifiers are obscured. In comparison to realist and historical fiction, Black speculative fiction writers frequently do not use racial identifiers for their characters because they use the genre to bypass the barriers of the “real world,” employing the supernatural, aliens or non-human entities, or advanced technology as ways to critique and examine the social and political struggles that have historically impacted Black people. Although we are working within a structured coding system, we had to ensure that the terms and categories used during annotation remained flexible enough to accommodate any genre of Black fiction in order to avoid flattening or erasing important aspects of the Black experience.

This annotation guidelines for this project provides the structure needed to keep data standardized during collection and categorization, but its flexibility allows annotators to bring imagination, critical thinking, and literary interpretation to their work with Black short stories.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Transforming Literature into Data

By Jade Harrison

When a short story becomes a dataset, the scale of interpretation transforms from individual moments to structural patterns.

As Lyric Hoover, a member of our Data Rangers explained, “When annotating ‘Patient Zero’ by Tananarive Due, I noticed how transforming literature into data allowed me to readily notice patterns in character dialogue, like Due’s tendency in this story to summarize conversations rather than write them out as regular dialogue.” Her reflection mirrors what I observe across the project. Once dialogue is tracked consistently, a writer’s structural tendencies become more visible to the reader.

When dialogue, character presence, and setting are quantified, patterns of emphasis become easier to track. We can see who speaks most often, which spaces recur, and how frequently certain interactions shape the narrative. This broader visibility allows us to interpret narrative structure at scale while remaining attentive to literary nuance.

Working between story and spreadsheet has clarified for me that data modeling and literary analysis function best when they shape one another.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

The Value of Merging Comics Studies and African American Literary Studies

1. Deepening Our Reading of Black Comics
Reading Black Panther through African American literary studies reveals how Ta-Nehisi Coates draws on continuums shaped by Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, and others, transforming superhero narrative into Black historical meditation and diasporic world-building.

2. Expanding the African American Literary Archive
Recognizing comics as serious artistic production acknowledges that major Black writers now work in visual narrative forms and positions Coates’s fifty-issue run on Black Panther as a significant contribution worthy of preservation and study.

3. Tracking Attention and Visibility Across Media
Bringing these fields together clarifies how buzz, adaptations, media amplification, and uneven reception shape which Black writers gain prominence and which remain marginalized.

4. Highlighting Collaborative Creative Networks
Merging comics studies with African American literary studies shifts focus from the solitary author to the broader creative ecosystem of writers, artists, editors, and the expansive “Comics Tree” surrounding a major figure like Coates. 

5. Securing Cultural Memory
Integrating Black comics into the institutional frameworks of African American literary study increases the likelihood that works like Coates’s Black Panther endure rather than fading amid the rapid churn of the comics marketplace.

Related: 
• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

5 Reasons to Read a Book on Black Panther

Marvel’s Black Panther comic book isn’t just a character — it’s a cultural battleground. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run, the series becomes a high-profile arena where debates about race, representation struggles, nationhood, and media visibility are staged within the powerful storytelling machinery of mainstream comics.

Here are five reasons to read a book devoted to this moment:

Because Black Panther is bigger than a superhero. It’s a long-running cultural site where ideas about Africa, Black power, and global Black identity get staged, revised, and contested.

Because Coates’s run is a rare crossover moment. A nationally visible Black essayist and novelist entering Marvel created an unusual collision of literary celebrity, comics industry logic, and mass attention.

Because the book explains why “diversity” is never simple. It shows how representation gains can produce new tensions, uneven visibility, and backlash, even when the outcome looks like progress.

Because it reveals how Marvel operates as an attention machine. The study highlights how companies leverage “buzz,” publicity, and cultural capital to shape what gets read, celebrated, and sold.

Because it offers a new way to read comics. By bringing African American literary studies into conversation with comics studies, the book gives readers tools for understanding Black Panther as serious Black artistic production, not just pop culture.

Related: 

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

One Possible Solution for Organizing Short Fiction

By Kenton Rambsy

My approach to annotating over 300 short stories using a shared schema or framework seeks to track several features related to character demographics, character dialogue, and geography-setting references.

These categories are derived from features that literary scholars already analyze yet encoding or organizing them in such a way facilitates our ability to perform computational analysis across several texts. Instead of reading stories in isolation, the framework makes their internal architecture visible and comparable. A professor teaching “The Gilded Six Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, could discover other stories that focus on an extramarital affair, or a person reading “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison can focus on other stories that incorporate flashbacks.

Once these features are marked up consistently, we can compare stories across writers and even historical periods to see where patterns repeat and where they diverge. We can identify stories that rely on concentrated speech between only women characters, stories structured around private spaces like a bedroom inside a family home or stories that focus on characters from a certain region or with specific attributes. Those comparisons provide the basis for grouping texts by craft and creative features rather than by period alone.

Therefore, by creating a scaffolding for short stories, this project attempts to create a more durable way of discussing short stories in the field by building an infrastructure necessary for classification and sustained comparison.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

On Historical Periods Serving as the Default Framework for Short Stories

By Kenton Rambsy

Too often chronology serves as a prevailing way to organize short fiction since the genre lacks a shared and structural vocabulary to describe the form in depth.

We encounter short stories grouped under headings such as Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts, or Contemporary eras. These labels are valuable for situating texts within historical continuums. The framing, though, has come to function as a substitute for classification.

When chronology becomes the primary organizing principle, stories within a single era are treated as though they share defining characteristics simply because they were written at the same moment. Structural differences within a period recede from view, while similarities across periods remain unexamined. For instance, a story published in the Harlem Renaissance about women empowerment may share more similarities with a twenty-first-century story than with other texts from its own decade.

If we rely exclusively on chronology, we organize stories by when they appeared rather than by how they operate.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

A Structural Problem in the Study of Black Short Fiction

By Kenton Rambsy

Black short fiction is widely read, frequently anthologized, and regularly taught, yet it lacks the structural scaffolding that shapes how we organize and interpret it.

With novels, we speak easily in subgenres such as neo-slave narratives, or detective or romance novels. With poetry, we hear of different forms and aesthetic traditions. The labels describe the texts, but they also facilitate the grouping and comparing of writers across various historical period.

Some individual stories by major writers receive noticeable attention. However, what remains underdeveloped is a comparable system for linking stories across authors by structural similarity. We do not instinctively name recurring narrative types within Black short fiction in the same way we do for novels or poetry, and as a result, stories are often discussed writer by writer rather than as part of a mapped continuum.

Without that connective vocabulary, Black short fiction remains harder to cluster, compare, and imagine as a coherent body of work.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project