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