Decoding Diaspora: Mapping J. A. Rogers' Mythic Africa Main Menu Table of Contents Explore and Navigate the Different Facets of the Decoding Diaspora project. Project An Introduction by Dr. Richard Newton Researchers and Community Partners Participants and Partners in Decoding Diaspora Interpretations Use Digital Tools to Explore How J. A. Rogers Understood "Africa" Essays Experimental Studies Using the Data and Interpreations Featured Here References Project Bibliography and Recommended Readings Use and Permissions Terms and Conditions Governing the Creation and Use of the Project

Data

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Joel Augustus Rogers’ Facts About the Negro is a fascinating African diasporic "signification." Historian of Religion Charles Long employs the term to highlight “the ways in which names are given to realities and peoples during this period of [post-Enlightenment] conquest; this naming is at the same time an objectification through categories and concepts of those realities which appear as novel and “other” to the cultures of conquest.” Rogers’ response to this scenario of social dispersion is to (re)write its history, a narrative that illustrates Black people as originary yet prescient, dispersed yet pervasive, self-sufficient yet contingent. In addition to investigating the interpretive ends of his efforts, the Decoding Diaspora project thrives on the presentation of the means by which he did so. We have made the data set accessible to you in the manner described below in hopes that you will collaborate with us.


Gallery


The gallery above contains scanned pages from the Facts About the Negro column collected by John Rice and assembled by Lucille Kemp Rice, the uncle and grandmother of Project Director Richard Newton. Each image is denoted as FN-# to note its sequence and to correspond to entries in the metadata and text corpus below. Click each page to see a larger rendering of the page along with source information.
 

Text Corpus


The text corpus contains a transcription of all the text found in the Facts About the Negro gallery. The text is separated by pages (FN-#), corresponding to the gallery and metadata. The text files may be downloaded from GitHub. The texts is rendered in the .txt file type.
 

Metadata



This spreadsheet delineates elements noted in the gallery for the purposes of further machine-assisted analysis. Each entry corresponds to the pages in the Facts About the Negro gallery (FN-#) as well as each vignette’s location on the page (A refers to top-left; B, top-right; C, bottom-left; D, bottom-right). Other entries include data pertaining to dates, locations, names, representation of gender in the text, and actual artifacts mentioned in the vignettes. The metadata spreadsheet may be downloaded from GitHub. The metadata is rendered in the .xlsx file type.
 

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