Digital Humanities, Collaborative Scholarship, and Archiving Caribbean Intellectuals

Honors Program presents a seminar in Digital Humanities, Collaborative Scholarship, and Archiving Caribbean Intellectuals by Dr. Kelly Baker Josephs of the English Department

Begun as a collective Zotero effort at the Caribbean Digital researchathon in December 2014, “The Kamau Brathwaite Bibliography” was published as a work in progress February 2018. Following the “hype” of a collaborative digital effort, there is seldom much reward to be found in completing the painstaking follow-up process within the current academic humanities mandate of single-authored publications. Therefore, such projects often languish, feeding skepticism about the utility of collaborative and grass-roots digital work, particularly in Black Atlantic Studies. This presentation considers moments of conflict and incompatibility between available resources – human and technological – and the distinct trajectories of Caribbean intellectual life, in general, and of Kamau Brathwaite’s career in particular.