When Spreadsheets Meet Black Literary Study

By Kenton Rambsy

When Data Rangers annotate Black short stories, they discover how tools like Excel can be powerful instruments for literary analysis.

Lyric Hoover, a junior English major at Howard University, admitted that before this project she “didn’t view tools like Microsoft Excel as important to my research within the field of literary studies,” but annotation helped her recognize “the usefulness of data in conducting literary analysis.” Gabriella Pardlo, a sophomore Economics major at Howard, shared that Word and Excel once felt like “just apps I used for class,” yet she now understands how they “collect and organize aggregate data.”

Both Data Rangers began seeing spreadsheets as tools to organize and analyze information related to dialogue, character, and setting become visible through line-by-line annotations. Normally, people would think of using Excel for literary studies or think about using Word as a tool to extract and clean data. These Data Rangers found that computational precision, however, can deepen rather than dilute close reading when using Excel to clean data, apply formulas, and build pivot tables.

For Lyric and Gabriella, familiar tools like Excel serve new intellectual purposes as they reflect on how spreadsheets can organize literary insight and reshape how they think about using digital tools in scholarly work.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project