Essays

Research Questions

What does a digitally-legible corpus of Rogers’ Facts About the Negro suggest about Rogers’ theory of geography and history in the African diaspora?  How might we redescribe and digitally represent Rogers’ “discursive cartography.”

In her comparative work on myth, Wendy Doniger theorizes myth as a complex of micromyths (the narrative kernels of story that reside in all permutations of it) and macromyths (the myriad extrapolations, interpretations and significations of a story)  How might we use digital tools our  corpus into micromyths (the “facts” Rogers’ presents) and the macromyths (the “Negro” Rogers’ constructs)? The playful use of “kernel” is intentional as its valence in computer programming may give us clues on how to think about building toward this.

Bruce Lincoln poignantly described myth as “ideology in narrative form.” While we’ve used GIS, a timeline, and text visualizations to facilitate our study of the forms Rogers’ ideology takes, how might we forensically chart the narrative of Rogers’ ideology? Are there ways to approximate Rogers’ formation of Facts About the Negro? Can visualizations, such as lenses, reveal discursive interstices that we might otherwise miss?

Roland Barthes famously presented a scaffolded model of signification for theorizing myth: the fractal link between signs, signifiers, and signified. Given advances in text mining and machine-learning, could we create a language model for deconstructing the corpus in this way? What would it mean to teach a machine to signify?

Data is always examined post facto. And thus the representation of it and the establishment of its parameters are always constructed by the scholar. Can anachronism however be used as a tool for critical research? How might the 3D print exhibition, the micro-podcast, and the image gallery be used suggest an answer? How are they opportunities for developing sharper theories and methods for historiography?

To what extent might one’s answers change were we to add data from Rogers’ other work, whether from the Facts About the Negro series or elsewhere?

How would you bring your expertise to bear on the project and corpus before you?

How would you use this corpus to investigate your data, archive, or problematic of your expertise?

NAVIGATION