In my book, I draw on The Black Short Story Dataset to analyze the circulation of short stories over nearly 100 years. The dataset contains a variety of information, including story titles, original sites of publication, author birth years, and additional information about the authors. The dataset makes it possible to peruse information about 300 authors relatively quickly.
A sample of 100 anthologies is hardly exhaustive, but a dataset of this size nonetheless offers an expansive body of information on some of our most canonically significant writers and stories.
While conventional bibliographies remain important, we can further advance African American literary studies by taking advantage of datasets, which greatly assist in exploring and quantifying multifaceted publishing histories. We additionally gain an understanding of framing practices by taking a closer look at the work of editors, an important but often overlooked group of contributors to the transmission of African American literature.
This entry is part of a series--A Notebook on The Geographies of African American Short Stories.
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