The poet-researcher in the age of Black Lives Matter

Check out the notes section of Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue (2021), and you'll see her statement,  "Several poems are informed by and developed from autopsy, police, and other state documents, along with personal testimonies and manifestoes." Hey, that note is an indication that we're witnessing a poet-researcher producing work in the age of Black Lives Matter.

For the last two decades, I've been taking note of poets working through the archives, often focusing on documents related to slavery. Elizabeth Alexander on the Venus Hottentot, and later Alexander and then Kevin Young on the Amistad. But there's also Tyehimba Jess and Adrian Matejka on Leadbelly and Jack Johnson, respectively. There's Robin Coste Lewis working through art history.  

It was Marilyn Nelson's book Carver (2001) that first got me on to this idea of poet-researchers. That's not to say black poets weren't digging into the archives and history books even earlier. They were. Most notably in some ways  for me was Robert Hayden. Think of his "Middle Passage" and "Runagate Runagate" as precursors to what we're seeing.  

Alright, all good. 

But Maner said autopsies. Police reports. Other state documents. She's clearly elevating things. Or digging deep or in new places. 

Realizing that those were the documents she drew on had me re-reading several pieces in new ways. Her poems on Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and Natasha McKenna aren't just a poet turning inward and presenting words based solely on her imagination. No, here, we're seeing the results of a researcher and a poet, of a writer reading, analyzing, remixing, re-presenting. 

What happens when a poet-researcher reads the medical examiner's report about a black woman who was found dead from a hanging in her jail cell? Maner tells us in "Upon Reading the Autopsy of Sandra Bland." What do things look like as facts and imaginings are gathered in the case of a black woman who was repeatedly tasered by police and eventually died from the injuries? Maner's poem on McKenna provides some answers. 

Little Girl Blue is this lil chapbook, but it's pointing to big things in terms of how we envision poet-researchers in the age of Black Lives Matter. 

Related: 

• Angel C. Dye's Breathe and Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue

Angel Dye's Breathe: Celebrations and serious introspections

Angel C. Dye's poems in Breathe had me moving in multiple directions.

After reading "Black is" and "Breathe," I was going to talk about this book of celebrations. Dye gives us powerful renderings of black people, black women, and black culture. 

That observation remains true. 

But I also read her poem "Keeping Company," and the opening lines got me: "The thing you hate most about yourself / invites itself over / shows up at your door unannounced." 

Whew. 

Breathe had me thinking about variations -- the ups and downs, the moves this way and the moves that way. 

So that's what we have: outward celebrations and serious introspections. 

That "serious" can sometimes be pained, and other times it can be about a kind of searching or a kind of recognition of solemn understanding. Her serious observations often slow my reading, as I have to stop and think a little about what she's saying. 

Or more truthfully, here's the thing: when Angel Dye is writing personally about her, you sometimes feel that she's writing personally about you. Like I said, serious. 

Related:

• Angel C. Dye's Breathe and Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue

A List of Edward P. Jones’s Visualization

By Kenton Rambsy

In the Fall of 2017, I taught a graduate seminar “Lost in the City” where my students and I performed close reads to create a dataset based on the locations and characters mentioned in his two short story collections. We used the data to publish the edited collection Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones's Short Fiction that contained seven visualizations related to his stories. 

We later published our dataset to the Black Studies & Digital Humanities Dataverse, and since then, I have collaborated with other scholars to produce visualizations that offer an entry point to Jones’s short story collections for readers to comprehend the several hundred location references. 

Below, I have provided a list of those eleven visualizations. 

• Edward P. Jones Short Story Overview: (Viz by Peace Ossom-Williamson).

• Lost in the City - Character Overview: dialogue by gender (Viz by Peace Ossom-Williamson).

• All Aunt Hagar’s Children - Character Overview:  dialogue by gender (Viz by Peace Ossom-Williamson).

• Visualizing Quadrants in Jones's Short Fiction: place-setting in DC (Viz by Peace Ossom-Williamson).

• Edward P. Jones Heat Map: shows frequency of action in stories (Viz by Ahmed Foggie).

• Lost in the City - GIS Map: shows addresses referenced (Viz by Ahmed Foggie).

• All Aunt Hagar's Children - GIS Map: shows addresses referenced (Viz by Ahmed Foggie).

• Lost in the City - Story Map: plots DC locations in stories (Viz by Kukhyoung Kim).

• All Aunt Hagar’s Children – Story Map: plots DC locations (Viz by Kukhyoung Kim).

• Shifting Demographics in Lost in the City: identifies landmarks and overlays census records.

• Shifting Demographics in All Aunt Hagar’s Children: identifies landmarks and overlays census records.

Angel C. Dye's poem for black girls

I was recently reading the title poem from Angel C. Dye's Breathe (2021), and I started thinking about the convergence of ideas and artistic worlds that make a piece like this one possible. The kinds of poetry. The discussions and debates about black women and girls. The recognition of unconventional figures. The acknowledgement of inner struggles. All that in one black poem.    

On the one hand, the spirit of the poem connects to spoken word--the repetitions, the hook, the alliteration, and the subject matter. At the same time, I encountered the work in this book of distinctly literary poems. Dye is versatile like that.   

The poem is comprised of five parts, each beginning with a common refrain: "I breathe for black girls / who came to the realization that they were black girls / by being told it was the wrong thing to be," and "I breathe for black girls who names we gotta chant and march for / to make they remembered," and later, "I breathe for black girls who unconventional."

Each section addresses different kinds of black girls and women. Remember Margaret Walker's famous poem "For My People"? Well, here, Dye is offering that, but for black girls. She connects the dots among all these different folks.

Early on, Dye notes that she's breathing for those who "Don't know whether they deaf or insane / from the screams slamming doors in the hallways of they minds." Here, the considerations of black women's mental health took me back to the coverage of that subject in Jae Nichelle's "Friends with Benefits." Dye, Jae Nichelle, and many others are taking us in new directions within black poetry along those lines. 

Dye takes up the topics of mental health and healing a little more in other poems, notably with her piece "Resisting Self-Diagnosis on the Road to Healing." The poem includes several directives, opening with an important one: "The first thing to remember is to forget / the word crazy." That line had me trying to remind myself of so many other words to forget as well. Hey, that's another story. 

"Breathe" is by a poet who looks at, sees, hears, listens to, studies, communes with, and continuously thinks about black women. It's a poem by someone who envisions speaking to and being heard by black women. These qualities of subject and audience are noteworthy.  

You'd be surprised at how many poets and poems overlook black women audiences. We know of many black women poets, and we know of many award-winning ones. Yes. But what I'm saying is that we have fewer poems for (representing) and for (directed at) black women in the way offered here by Dye. 

Related:

• Angel C. Dye's Breathe and Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue

Sequoia Maner's Tupac and Prince Poems

For many decades, going back at the very least to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown, black poets highlighted black musicians in their works. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Arts era, poets became particularly interested in producing works on these cultural figures, composing works on Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklins, James Brown, several jazz musicians, and most notably John Coltrane. 

In her poetry chapbook, Little Girl Blue (2021), Sequoia Maner's Tupac and Prince poems extend the many works we've seen on black musicians. Her poem "Epistle" for and to Tupac reads as a letter with her communicating to the subject about where he came from and his movements across his career. "You are scattered like jazz across these states" and "You are the ring shout of a radical tradition," and later "You are the sound a ghost makes when it returns to a body." 

We're getting to look over the poet's subject as she communicates with Tupac. We're moving along with Tupac as he is reminded about his significance. Maner's practice of speaking directly to her subject of course took me back to Dunbar's Douglass, where he's talking directly to his subject. Who knew that Dunbar and now Maner could speak, through poems, to those whom we assumed were dead? 

And listen, Maner keeps going. Part one of her Tupac epistolary poem looks somewhat like a conventional poem with short lines and phrasings. Part two appears more like a conventional letter, and then Part three, "a resurrection recipe" appears as a list of ingredients. Look, this ain't your everyday elegy, is it? 

And then still, her "The Day Prince Died" poem does something else. Here, the poet discusses the many actions and changes someone went through when Prince passed away. Maner writes, "the day Prince died she devolved n2 muteness" and on that day, she "wander-wondered / danced profusely" later still "she married a man / she married a woman / she was always alone." 

I really valued how this poem got me thinking about tributes and elegies in a way that I had not really considered enough. What happens to an individual person when a major musician dies? What changes are prompted when we lose public figures? What movements do we do, and what interactions do we end up having? Maner's poems had me wander-wondering. 

Related:

• Angel C. Dye's Breathe and Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue

• Sequoia Maner and the ongoing sagas of Black Elegies

Sequoia Maner and the ongoing sagas of Black Elegies

Almost twenty years ago when I began studying the Black Arts Movement, I started noticing all these tribute poems or elegies focusing on Malcolm X. Or hold up. Perhaps, I began reading these Malcolm X poems, and that led to my interest in the Black Arts Movement. Either way, I became increasing interested in how poets used memorials, tributes, elegies to explore ideas and expand knowledge.

I thought on those works and the varied approaches recently as I read Sequoia Maner's recent book of poems Little Girl Blue (2021). Published by Host Publications and winner of the Fall 2021 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, Maner's book includes poems focusing on Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Tupac, Natasha McKenna, and Prince.

It's worth noting that Maner is a co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (2020), which is to say she's been thinking on elegies in scholarly and poetic contexts. I'll do future entries on other aspects of Little Girl Blue, but for now, I wanted to note this point that Maner connects to a longer history of tribute poems and elegies by black poets. 

Not long after Frederick Douglass died on February 20, 1895, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote an elegy "Frederick Douglass," which he read at a memorial service in honor of the towering figure. Later, Dunbar wrote another elegy entitled "Douglass." Over the decades, Douglass became a recurring subject for elegies. Langston Hughes, Sam Cornish, Dudley Randall, Evie Shockley, Tim Seibles, and others have composed Douglass poems. Those Douglass poems are part of a large body of works that memorialize formerly enslaved people. 

Slavery is not a central feature of Maner's book, but this practice of reflecting on black lives in verse is what connects her to these previous generations of poets. 

Over the last 66 years, Emmett Till has been a most enduring figure in poetry. Shortly after Till was killed in 1955, people began writing elegies about him, contributing to many, many works on the 14-year-old. In the coverage of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, commentators and literary artists frequently invoked Till. So, Maner's "Black Boy Contrapuntal" (for Trayvon Martin) links to the contemporary pieces on Martin and others, but it also stretches back to Till.

Martin and Till were both suspects for crimes they didn't commit, and yet were quickly tried and sentenced to death in some unjust, racist court. Maner's contrapuntal indicates that the poem can be read in multiple ways, and her "black boy" can be read as representing the circumstances of many black boys.  

You read through the poem enough, and then you start picking up all the included words and phrases: "I don't belong here anymore," "invisible," "a thug," "a nuisance," "suspiciously tall," "concealed in a hoodie," "body of a boy." 

Her poem "Upon Reading the Autopsy of Sandra Bland" shows the poet responding in particular to he medical examiner's statement that "the neck is remarkable for a ligature furrow." Those two words become the basis for mediations and explorations of those two terms connect to Bland and so many other ideas and histories.  

The poem "For Natasha McKenna" blends or moves in and out of perspectives as well. On the one hand, there are primarily descriptions of McKenna's experiences from a third-person perspective in part one, and in the second section, the poet presents McKenna's first-person perspective a running series of statements beginning with "If sometimes..." as in "If sometimes my mind gets to wandering from this plane to where sound gives way to silence," "If sometimes there is no joy," "If sometimes the cries of a babygirl cannot move me."

The poem is so compelling in part because we hear from this woman who lacked supportive witnesses.  After all, police shackled McKenna and used tasers to repeatedly stun her. At one point, some of her last words (which Maner closes the poem with) were, "You promised you wouldn’t kill me" / "I didn't do anything." So we're haunted by the words McKenna said as well as those imagined in the poem.  

I was reading Maner's poems and thought of powerful poems focusing on Nat Turner, Malcolm, and Emmett Till. I also considered ways that these pieces in Little Girl Blue shifted the nature of previous works--highlighting black women subjects yes, but also using language and structures inventively. So among other attributes, Little Girl Blue represents the ongoing sagas of black elegies. 

Related: 

• Angel C. Dye's Breathe and Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue 

• Sequoia Maner's Tupac and Prince Poems

Angel C. Dye's Breathe and Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue

I've been taking a longish break from blogging about poetry. Taking time to regroup and to change directions. But look, two scholar-artists  know released chapbooks this year, and that gives me reason to write a little bit about verse. Sequoia Maner's Little Girl Blue (Host Publications) and Angel C. Dye's Breathe (Central Square Press) are thought-provoking, enjoyable reads. 

I met Sequoia, a new assistant professor of literature at Spelman College, some years ago at an NEH summer institute on black poetry hosted by the University of Kansas. She was sharp then; she's sharp now. I knew of her as a scholar long before I knew of her as a poet, though in retrospect I should've known from the jump. 

I met Angel, who's currently a PhD student at Rutgers University, back in 2016, as she participated in a summer program for undergraduates I teach for at the University of Texas at San Antonio. At the time, she was a student at Howard University, and after graduating, she earned an MFA at the University of Kentucky.   

So often, I get conventional volumes of poetry, and it's much rarer for me to buy chapbooks. But I'm glad I became aware of Little Girl Blue and Breathe and that purchasing copies online was such an easy process. I was of course pleased to check out the poetry debuts of two writers I've followed for a while in different venues.   

Moving forward, I'll publish a few blog entries about aspects of their books that caught my attention. 

Entries:

Day 1: 

• Sequoia Maner and the ongoing sagas of Black Elegies  

• Angel C. Dye's poem for black girls

• Sequoia Maner's Tupac and Prince Poems

Day 2:

• Angel Dye's Breathe: Celebrations and serious introspections

• The poet-researcher in the age of Black Lives Matter

Day 3

• Women as crucial muses for Angel Dye

• And now Sequoia Maner covers Little Girl Blue

Day 4

• Angel C. Dye and those missing women in poetry 

• Sequoia Maner's "Tangle of Pathology"

Day 5

• Angel C. Dye in the mix

• Sequoia Maner in the mix

Edward P. Jones & DC’s Four Quadrants

Locations in the Stories

By Kenton Rambsy

The layout of Washington, DC, which is divided into four quadrants Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, and Southeast, contributes to how Edward P. Jones presents characters across DC in his two short story collections Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006).

My colleague Peace Ossom-Williamson and I created a Tableau Public chart that enables readers to visually sift through the mentions of quadrants and settings in a given Edward P. Jones story. The various shades of green represent each of DC’s four quadrants.

In the top left corner, the pie chart represents the percentages of times a specific quadrant appears across his two collections of short stories. To the right, the various boxes represent location types ranging from homes and neighborhoods to schools and churches. The larger the box, the more times a particular setting was used in a specific quadrant.

Hovering over each box reveals the percentage of times the location was used in that quadrant. The bottom charts offer another visualization of the same information in the form of bar charts. This representation ranks the order of location types Jones features in his collections.

The charts provide more context as to how the physical geography of DC fits into Jones’s stories. For instance, even though most of his stories are set in the Nation’s Capital, Jones doesn’t cover all of the neighborhoods in the same manner. Jones primarily sets the action of his stories in the Northwest Quadrant. Within that quadrant, the settings he usually incorporates are homes and neighborhoods, businesses, schools, and other public venues.

This type of visualization shifts our attention to consider what extent Jones’s incorporates specific aspects of DC’s geography into his fictional stories. Moreover, this visualization more clarity as to how readers envision Jones’s stories, and the locations he is most fond of in DC.

Poetry and the New York Times 100 Notable Books

Every year, the New York Times releases a list of 100 Notable Books. Given my interest in tracking poetry news, I often take notice of the poetry volumes that make the list. Over the last ten years (2011 - 2021), the Times has selected 34 volumes of poetry for the list.

Most years during the last decade, 3 volumes appeared on the list. In 2011, 2014, and 2016, 4 volumes made the list. In 2012 and 2021, 2 volumes made the list. 

For decades now, people have wondered whether poetry is dying. At the same time, people (poets, most vocally) have stated that poetry is quite popular. 

The New York Times 100 Notable Books indicates that poetry is reliably present, but its presence on their list at least is relatively small.

Moving forward with Academic Journeys

On August 30, 2018, Keith, a then first-year African American man at the university did an interview, where he talked about his intended major, his interests, and other thoughts about life as a college studen. He followed up his second year on October 1, 2019 with another interview focusing on the same topics, and he did a third inteview on October 9, 2020. Earlier this semester, Keith saw me on campus and reminded me that he hadn't done his annual interview yet. He did this interview, his fourth year participating, on October 13, 2021. 

Keith is among a group of nearly 180 black students who have participated in our oral history project, Academic Journeys. Some students did just one interview. Others did two and three. Keith and another student, Jaala, have now done four interviews -- one each year since 2018, when the project began.

I created the project as a way to document students discussing their experiences or journeys at the university over the course of time. The interviews served as audio snapshots of what the students think about their academic careers at a given time. 

Responding to questions about majors and minors and about overall thoughts about navigating a university gives the students a moment to reflect. Rarely do people place the voices and perspectives of black students at the center of a knowledge building project about academic experience.   

We'll eventually find ways to make aspects of the interviews available for new students on campus. We'll also produce reports based on some of the lessons we can learn from what students have experienced and thought about here. 

For now, we'll continue moving forward tracking the academic journeys of students. 

Related:

• Academic Journeys project

Visualizing Protagonist Gender in Edward P. Jones’s Stories

Edward P. Jones: Comparing  Collections

By Kenton Rambsy

Edward P. Jones is one of the most data rich short story writers that I’ve encountered in African American literature. I’ve found visualizations a useful way to catalogue the several references he makes in his stories.

Most people are aware that his stories are littered with references to neighborhoods, businesses, streets, public parks and other landmarks in Washington, D.C. In addition to the several place-references, Jones also includes more than 500 characters across his two short story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006).

My colleague Peace Ossom-Williamson and I collaborated on visualizations that make the abundant data points that comprise Jones’s short stories easier to comprehend. In 2019, we served as co-editors for Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones's Short Fiction, where we included many interactive graphics. Inspired by the website, Lit Charts, we thought about how we could create visualizations that facilitate a reader’s ability to navigate Jones’s stories and learn more about his collections from a bird’s eye view.

This chart offers an overview of the gender of a given story’s protagonist as well as the ratio of words spoken by male and female characters in each collection. At the top right hand of the chart, there is a bar chart that compares the total number of words and word types in each collection. Below, in red and blue, is a gender analysis of the characters. The red bars represent the number of words spoken by female characters. The blue bars represent the number of words spoken by male characters. At the bottom, the red and blue symbols represent the gender of the protagonist in each story. Hovering over each symbol will reveal the story title and protagonist name.

These side-by-side comparisons provide insight into the character dialogue in Jones’s stories and offer a comparison of each story’s protagonist in his two collections. For instance, viewers can easily discern that Jones uses far more female protagonists in his stories compared to male protagonists. In his first collection, women and men characters nearly have the same amount of speaking parts, but in the second collection, there is a shift. Not only is the collection longer, but male character overtake female characters in terms of speaking roles by a significant margin.

This visualization provides one possibility for how data might be used to understand the various moving parts of a short story collection or a group of several texts.

Reading Edward P. Jones with Maps

Lost in the City: Story Map

By Kenton Rambsy

In a review of Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” John Harrison recommends readers “having a map of the area handy.” Because of the heavy reference to the street plan of D.C., Harrison explains, “Each story traces a journey—planned or unplanned, taken or failed—and an obvious root/route symbolism runs throughout the collection.” This idea has been a guiding principle as I collaborated with various people to transform data related to Jones’s stories into interactive visualizations.

Edward P. Jones published two collections of short fiction, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006) that are set primarily in DC and reference over 200 locations. The references to homes and neighborhoods as well as walking and driving routes can be overwhelming for readers, especially if they are not familiar with DC’s geography.

All Aunt Hagar's Children: Story Map

I collaborated with Kukhyoung Kim to create two story maps for each collection that offered readers a way to interpret Jones’s stories and make sense of the several locations. In these two visualizations -- Lost in the City: Story Map and All Aunt Hagar's Children: Story Map, users are presented with an overview of every single story that plots the DC locations referenced in each story. 

This facilitates a viewers’ ability to literally read Jones’s stories with a map. We also overlayed each map with demographic data from the year 2017 (the year we made this visualization) so viewers can see how population shifts in Jones’s stories.

Coupled with Jones’s writing, this visualization offers an immersive reading experience where the various filters add social and historical context to Jones’s DC settings. As a practice, data storytelling enhances the reading of Jones’s stories by grounding the two collections in geographic specificity.

A short, select list of African American Biographies

A few biographies 

• 1973: The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre
• 1977: Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography by Robert Hemenway
• 1986: The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America by Arnold Rampersad
• 1986: The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad
• 1988: Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man by Margaret Walker
• 1993: W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race by David Levering Lewis
• 2000: W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 by David Levering Lewis
• 2001: Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley
• 2002: Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd
• 2003: Harriet Jacobs: A Life by Jean Yellin
• 2004: Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White
• 2007: Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad
• 2010: John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard
• 2011: Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
• 2013: Nikki Giovanni: A Literary Biography by Virginia C. Fowler
• 2017: Chester B. Himes: A Biography by Lawrence P. Jackson
• 2018: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart
• 2018: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
• 2018: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry
• 2020: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne

• 2021: Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay by Shanna Greene Benjamin 

• 2021: Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson

• 2021: Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America by Keisha N. Blain

Related:
• Malcolm X, Biography Work, and the University of Georgia

• A Bibliography of Black Writer Biographies

Malcolm X, Biography Work, and the University of Georgia

On November 17, I'm talking Malcolm X and biography work in a program sponsored by the University of Georgia. 

Below are materials related to my talk:

• A short, select list of African American Biographies 

• A roundup of Malcolm X books 

Related: 

• A Bibliography of Black Writer Biographies

Data Storytelling: A Crucial Gateway to DH Scholarship

By Kenton Rambsy

Data storytelling is a skillset everyone in Digital Humanities (DH) should consider. Similar to data journalism, the process of data storytelling revolves around analyzing and filtering large bodies of organized information for the purposes of creating a narrative with visualizations that provide insight on a particular subject.

Data storytelling brings together numerical findings, visuals, and narrative to facilitate a researcher’s presentation of large sums of information in palatable ways. By merging these three components, researchers make metrics useful by contextualizing data points. Readers can gleam insight since a goal of data storytelling is to reduce unnecessary fodder and focus on essential findings.

Data storytelling also enables practitioners to acquire general data analytic skillsets that can be applied to other research projects. Engaging in the process of data storytelling, people are given a chance to refine their technical skillsets such as scraping data, cleaning data, and using visualization software to transform it into visualizations. In my experiences, researchers can learn more about data collection, coding, and computational analysis while harvesting data.

With several emerging subfields in DH, it’s more important than ever that we identify general skillsets that are useful to researchers across multiple fields such as English, History, Political Science, and even sociology. Different fields are driven by various research methodologies. Therefore, finding a common ground can help spur activity in DH by focusing on key concepts and skills that can unite researchers from disparate fields.

Data storytelling proves to be most valuable when it helps audiences gain new insight and fresh perspectives on a particular subject or even when it inspires readers to take action. Data alone is just a collection of numbers and rarely useful without added
context. Visual narratives use data to create meaning. Design elements ranging from font shape and color to charts and hyperlinks of other websites all play a role in how researchers engage with their audience and relay information.

Haley Scholars (Group A1) Rion Amilcar Scott's “On the Occasion of the Death of Freddie Lee"

[Haley Reading groups Fall 2021]

Rion Amilcar Scott's "On the Occasion of the Death of Freddie Lee" focuses on the experiences of people on a slave-like rice farm. The protagonist becomes increasingly troubled that the group of laborers are prevented from addressing the death of Freddie, who died working and remained facedown in the crops for some time.

The story is eerie, disturbing, and at times gruesome as we consider what it means that a dead body remains on the ground and people are forced to continue working. 

What did you find most interesting, unsettling, or noteworthy about this story? 

Haley Scholars (Group B) Rion Amilcar Scott's “On the Occasion of the Death of Freddie Lee"

[Haley Reading groups Fall 2021]

Rion Amilcar Scott's "On the Occasion of the Death of Freddie Lee" focuses on the experiences of people on a slave-like rice farm. The protagonist becomes increasingly troubled that the group of laborers are prevented from addressing the death of Freddie, who died working and remained facedown in the crops for some time.

The story is eerie, disturbing, and at times gruesome as we consider what it means that a dead body remains on the ground and people are forced to continue working. 

What did you find most interesting, unsettling, or noteworthy about this story? 

Haley Reading (Group A2) Nafissa Thompson-Spires's “Whisper to a Scream”

[Haley Reading groups Fall 2021] 

By Lakenzie Walls and Howard Rambsy II

In Nafissa Thompson-Spires's final story, “Whisper to a scream,” we meet Raina, a young black high school student who makes ASMR videos. She deals with online harassment and self-esteem issues because of unusual interests. Her routine of whispering fairy tales and stroking feathers into her microphone gives her a large online following.

In one instance, Raina receives a message from a user she suspects is one of the guys from her high school. The comment suggests she wear her “Dorsey uniform in the next 1” (119). She makes a conscious effort to ignore racist and sexist comments online. Despite the online harassment, Raina continues posting content because she “worked best in short frames, quiet silvers, fragments” (134).

There are a number of fascinating or important moments in this story. Identify just one and briefly explain why you found that one most interesting or significant to consider in a short story. Please provide a page number. 

Rion Amilcar Scott's short story vs. poetry

This semester, I'm faciliating a couple reading group where students are reading Nafissa Thompson-Spires's short story collection Heads of the Colored People (2018) and Rion Amilcar Scott's collection The World Doesn't Require You (2019). 

In the near future, I plan to write more about student engagements with those collections, but for now I  had some brief thoughts about why Scott's work has captured the interests and imaginations of a group of students. In addition to covering his book with about 200 student readers, I'm covering some of his stories with students in one of my classes -- a group that is comprised of 20 first-year collegiate black men. 

Usually in that class, we cover short stories, poems, rap lyrics, essays, and more recently, a few comic books. In the past, when I polled students about works that moved them most, they would mention the poems and rap lyrics, with many noting their interest in "real life issues." This year, however, several students highlighted short stories, in particular, Scott's "The Electric Joy of Service," a tale about a Master who creates a robot who is very much like a slave. 

Students had expressed interest in learning more about slavery, and they are interested in far out, fantastical stories, so Scott's short fiction really captivated them. Are robots like slaves, or are slaves like robots, the young men wondered? Have some of our folks, like the robot protagonist in the story, been modified by Masters to ignore history and be content with the world as it is? What kind of mind does it take to think up a story like "The Electric Joy of Service"?

That Scott's story got us to those and other questions is part of what made it so memorable and admired by the guys in the class. 

In some respects, the embrace of sci-fi elements in Scott's story represents a turn from the apparent realness of the poems and raps that students in previous classes celebrated. I sometimes wonder what leads students to value one genre over the other, such as poetry over short stories or short stories over poetry. 

In this case, perhaps Scott's story just gave the guys so much to contend with: slavery, history, a Master, a robot, science fiction, machines, technology, artificial intelligence, the idea of revolution, business partners, and betrayal. Oh, and did I mention that the story is only about 1,200 words long? The brevity of a short story for first-year students matters, especially a story with so much going on.   

And there's more. "The Electric Joy of Service" is familiar and at the same time unfamiliar to the guys in the class. They've thought and heard about things like revolution, artificial intelligence, business partners, but not in the context of a literature class.  

Related: 

• Fall reading selection: The World Doesn't Require You

Blogging about Poetry in October 2021

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry] 

• October 8: Nathaniel Mackey's Breath and Precarity

• October 1: Blogging about poetry in September 2021