African American Literary Data Work -- ep. by Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

A short take on African American literary data work.

Written by Kenton Rambsy and Howard Rambsy II

Read by Kassndra Timm. 

Transcript

 Every month or every week even, someone releases one of those lists. “15 Great African American Novels.” “25 books by Black Women Everyone Should Read.” “40 Books by Contemporary Black writers.” Then, there are the ratings of books on Goodreads. And there are the pageviews on Wikipedia. 

These are just some of the ways that people present and examine novels using quantitative methods.   

You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions – a podcast about popular and critical responses to African American novels. 

At the intersection of novels and numerical information, there’s so much to consider. Word count. Vocabulary density. Average ratings. Percentages of prize winners. The hundreds of books published across a given decade. The 1.5 million pageviews for a novel’s Wikipedia entry. 

We might refer to the processes of gathering large bodies of information, applying numerical calculations, and producing literature-related graphs and visualizations as literary data work. And African American literary data work means applying these processes to novels by Black writers. 

African American literary data work is vital for organizing massive amounts of quantitative information concerning scholarly publications on Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and others. 

Literary data work can assist us in making sense of the relationship between film adaptations and Wikipedia pageviews, and literary data work presents us with findings and mysteries when it comes to ratings on the site Goodreads.  

More than simply confirming that a novel or author has received a remarkable reception, literary data work provides a measure of such responses.  

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This episode was written by Howard Rambsy and Kenton Rambsy. The episode was edited by Elizabeth Cali. 

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This podcast, Remarkable Receptions, is part of the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. The project was made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.  For more information, visit blacklitnetwork.org.