For Data Rangers Kweku Schmidt and Giselle Huggins, the process of annotating short fiction for computational analysis revealed artistic insight into Black literary texts.
While coding ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” Kweku, a senior English major from Morgan State University began noticing “how much the story relied on dialogue to move the plot forward, rather than action.” Giselle, a sophomore African American Studies major at Howard University, credits the annotation process with making her pay closer attention to “what is going on within the minds of the characters” when she highlights dialogue. After annotating Gloria Naylor’s “Lucielia Louise Turner,” moments when the protagonist imagines a fight with Eugene before it happens, stood out to her, making her identify how anticipated conversations shape the emotional structure of the story.
By slowing down to document each exchange, Kweku and Gisselle explain how writers use spoken and imagined conversations to construct psychological depth and relational conflict. Ironically, even though preparing a fictional text for digital study, they were able to home in on artistic elements of Black writers to better communicate how dialogue organizes tension, interiority, and pacing in Black short fiction.
Close reading, when paired with structured data collection, becomes a method for uncovering the architecture of Black storytelling.
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