Coding Imagination Within Clear Guidelines

By Kenton Rambsy

This project cemented for the Data Rangers that imaginative texts still require disciplined systems when transformed into structured data.

Nandi Chase, a sophomore Economics major at Howard University, discovered that annotating literature is not an open-ended exercise in interpretation. She admitted that “turning literature into data has more moving pieces than I realized,” and the process is “more formulaic and less subject to interpretation than I expected.” While the stories may be imaginative, the coding follows defined guidelines to ensure the integrity of the dataset.

Speculative fiction proved to be an interesting challenge for Lyric Hoover, a junior English major at Howard, since she had to apply the same principles to imagined worlds. She explained that “annotating speculative fiction felt so different from annotating non-speculative fiction,” especially when elements like geography and settings “required a different perspective and analytical process.” She had to determine how imaginative settings and speculative elements still fit within clear guidelines since the categories remain consistent across all stories for coding dialogue, character, and space.

The reflections underscore how even though imaginative, literature can be translated into structured data, but only through disciplined judgment that respects both genre and guidelines.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Quantifying Craft and Breaking Stories Into Data

By Kenton Rambsy

This annotation process requires the Data Rangers approach reading differently and focus on facets of each related to character demographics, dialogue, and settings.

“The story does feel different when I quantify it,” according to Howard University, senior African American Studies major at Howard University Cheyenne Freeman, because isolating dialogue, setting, and demographics “amplifies the sociological and psychological parts of the story and the character.” Surprisingly, pulling apart specific elements of a character during the annotation process helped her better understand how those elements work together. Damarian Washington, a junior History major at Howard, similarly shared that when you “break a story into segments,” you establish so much more context and understand how each element acts more like a “connective tissue than a continuous flow.”

Their reflections demonstrate how categorizing a story expands the ways in which we can interpret a story instead of flattening it. The process clarifies relationships between setting, speaker, and character presence. Ultimately, annotating these stories train Data Rangers to see how writers build coherence through structure and detail.

When we convert short fiction into structured data, we are uncovering artistic and structural choices that reveals how carefully a story was constructed in the first place.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Interpreting Short Fiction Through Annotation

By Kenton Rambsy

Transforming literary art like short fiction into an accurate dataset requires critical thinking, because every annotation decision determines how a story will be represented and analyzed later.

Abiba Moncriffe, a sophomore African American Studies major at Howard University, initially struggled to annotate settings during her first week because she “did not have a lot of information about where the characters were.”

She explains how that uncertainty forced her to sit with the absence of place, and “taught me the importance of details in storytelling and how the missing elements of location added to the way the story read.”India Crowe, a sophomore Sociology major at Howard, admitted that she often debates whether to include characters who “appear only once,” but she realized that “these moments teach me that less-involved characters still contribute to world-building and serve a purpose, even if it is not as explicit as others.”

These decisions require judgment. Data Rangers follow a shared system, rely on context clues, and ask questions when something is unclear. Their attention to detail demonstrates intellectual discipline and safeguards the accuracy of the dataset.

Each careful annotation reminds us that building a dataset from short fiction is an act of interpretation, not automation.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

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

Craft, Conversation, and Black Short Fiction

By Kenton Rambsy

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.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

The Origins of Writing Black Panther

Sometime after the mid-2010s, I began to notice something significant unfolding in comics: more Black writers were publishing titles with major comic book companies, and conversations about diversity were expanding in noticeable ways. By 2017, I had started sketching out draft tables of contents for what I imagined would become a book project.

Initially, I planned to write a book about “diversity in comic books,” tracing multiple developments across the industry. Between August 2017 and January 2021, I produced more than 30 drafts of a table of contents while continuing my research. Then, on March 7, 2021, I made a decisive shift. I wrote in my research log: "Made the decision to make the book about Black Panther and Coates, not about comics in general.” From that moment until October 11, 2024, I drafted 33 additional versions of the table of contents, steadily refining the project’s scope and structure.

On the one hand, I was aware of the limits of focusing on one Black writer at a time. On the other hand, I had compelling reasons to center Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was extending research I had begun in Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020), as well as in ideas I had been developing in my blog writing. Concentrating on Coates’s work on Black Panther also provided a powerful entry point for discussing other Black creators in comics and the broader ecosystem of critics, artists, and commentators shaping the field.

My two previous books were organized into five substantial chapters, each centered on a distinct topic. For this project, I wanted a different feel—more chronological and slightly less overtly academic. I ultimately structured the manuscript into ten shorter chapters, allowing the narrative to unfold across time while maintaining momentum.

An editor at Bloomsbury had read an article that my brother Kenton and I had written and invited us to submit a proposal for what became One Black Writer at a Time. When we submitted that proposal, I asked whether I could also share my manuscript on Black Panther, which was already well underway.

By the time I began writing the manuscript in earnest, I had spent years researching and outlining. I felt an unusual motivation to move steadily and deliberately. As I conceptualized the closing sections, I decided to title the final chapter “Star Wars for Black People,” borrowing a phrase used in 2018 to describe aspects of the Black Panther film. That framing allowed me to explore Coates’s conception of “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda,” Afrofuturist aesthetics, and my longstanding interest in Star Wars.

Knowing that chapter was ahead of me gave motivated me to keep a steady writing pace. I pushed forward, chapter by chapter, eager to reach it. When I finally finished, I felt satisfaction and also a touch of reluctance. I was glad to complete the book, but a part of me wanted to keep thinking and writing just a little longer.

Related:

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles (2026) focuses on Ta-Nehisi Coates's 50-issue run on the comic book and highlights the many developments taking place in the industry during that time.

Entries: 

• The Origins of Writing Black Panther

Overview of the Black Lit Network

The Black Lit Network is a dynamic, data-rich, and publicly accessible digital platform designed to strengthen and transform African American literary studies by expanding the discoverability of Black-authored works and connecting them to engaging multimedia resources for scholars, students, and broad public audiences.

The Network is organized around four main portals:

The Literary Navigator is a searchable, multi-genre digital archive that enables readers, students, and scholars to discover and explore more than 2,000 Black-authored works through interconnected, reader-centered pathways across genres, historical periods, and themes.

Remarkable Receptions Podcast is an audio series that examines the critical and popular responses to African American literary works, highlighting how Black writers and their texts have entered and shaped public and scholarly conversations.

This portal also includes a variety of videos, some focusing on African American poetry, and some on aspects of Black literary history.

The Literary Data Gallery showcases visual projects that use data to highlight Black writers, artists, and their cultural legacies. Through charts, timelines, and other visualizations, the Gallery reveals patterns in publishing, creative production, and critical attention, offering new ways to understand African American literary and artistic histories.

The Multithreaded Literary Glossary is a multimedia hub offering concise definitions, curated lists, key scenes, and interconnected commentary that illuminate the authors, genres, movements, and recurring themes shaping African American literary studies.

Related 

• Black Lit Network