BCaT Stayin’ Busy
by Tynesha McCullers, cross-posted from the BCaT Lab Blog
Believe it or not, we’re past the Ides of March and with Spring Break coming to a close there’s no better time to recap what the first half of the semester has looked like for the BCaT Lab. The month of February was complete with conference presentations, workshops, volunteering, and social events to keep us engaged in Black digital humanities and cultural scholarship. For Douglass Day on February 14th BCaT partnered with CAFe, the Driskell Center, STAMP, and scholars from the Department of Art History and Archaeology to host a transcribe-a-thon. The 4-hour event brought together volunteers who learned how to transcribe handwritten documents belonging to Frederick Douglass. While the physical collection is held at the Library of Congress, its 8,731 pages are made digitally available through the By the People virtual volunteer project. Letter exchanges between Douglass and his family, friends, activists, politicians, and other acquaintances from 1841-1912 are included in the collection and offer details about Douglass’ social and political life. BCaT was happy to sponsor and participate in such a crucial event for the third year in a row.
BCaT Graduate Fellow, Jessica Rucker, attended the 25th Annual Graduate Association for African American History (GAAAH) hosted by The University of Memphis in Memphis, TN. Each year the GAAAH conference brings together graduate students studying the art, culture, and life of Black people across the Diaspora and provides them with space to present their research and receive feedback from their colleagues. Jessica shared her paper “Keep it Black, Keep it Brief, and Keep it Online: Lessons from a Pedagogical Influencer” which explores Lynae Vanee Bogues’ Parking Lot Pimpin’ series and examines how it builds on African American history and activist memory work to teach about Black contemporary life on social media platforms. BCaT was proud to have Jessica represent us at such an important conference.
Members of the Black Digital Migration (BDM) collaborative research team traveled to New Orleans, LA for the Critical Approaches to Black Media Culture conference in February. Hosted by the Department of Communication at Tulane University, this 3-day convening brought scholars, practitioners, and artists from across the country to the Big Easy to present their research, learn from one another, and network. Dr. Briana Barner, Assistant Professor of Communication and former BCaT Graduate Fellow, presented “Podcasting as Pedagogy: The Development of the #BlackPodClass” which engaged the triumphs and challenges of creating and teaching a high impact course that encourages critical inquiry and experiential learning. Dr. Brienne Adams, Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University and BCaT affiliate, discussed her research “Talking About It: Industry Enmeshment and Black Digital Fandom” which examined fandom culture within the Black community in digital contexts. BCaT Postdoctoral Fellow and BDM project lead, Dr. Rianna Walcott, shared her forthcoming Just Tech paper titled “#RIPTwitter: The Conditions of Black Social Media Platform Migration” which interrogates the roles platform affordances play in social media users' migratory decisions, and parallels digital migration with historical Black diasporic movement. BCaT Graduate Fellows, Andrew Lowe Mohammed, Alisa Hardy and Tynesha McCullers, presented “Exploring Black Digital Migration Practices Through Collaborative Research” to explain our initial inquiry, methodological framework, as well as share our project’s current and upcoming outputs. We filled up on gumbo and beignets between learning from scholars which made our first conference as a team beyond memorable.
Last month, BCaT launched Book Club Lunch and Learn, a space where students, faculty and staff gather to discuss emerging texts critical to Black digital humanities and communication research. We began with Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture by Dr. Francesca Sobande. Dr. Sobande’s book examines corporations' use of sociopolitical issues in their branding and marketing campaigns as well as media portrayals of workplace culture. BCaT was happy to host Dr. Sobande in conversation to learn more insights about the text and ask questions regarding the material. In March the Book Club read Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife by Dr. Tonia Sutherland, where the consequences of digital memorialization of Black people are reflected upon by the author, and were joined by Dr Sutherland for a lecture and guest visit to the book club! In April, BCaT will read Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age by Dr. Raven Maragh-Lloyd. Remember that you can stop by the lab and pick up a free copy of Maragh-Lloyd’s book beginning in April while supplies last, and we will be joined by Dr Maragh-Lloyd for a talk and bookclub visit on 4/23 and 4/24.
At February’s BCaT Applies, attendees learned how to develop conference proposals for the Association of Internet Researcher’s (AoIR) with some participants preparing submissions for this year’s annual conference. Shortly thereafter came BCaT Eats when we enjoyed street tacos, listened to music, and journeyed down the rabbit hole that was Reesa Teesa’s “Who TF Did I Marry” TikTok series. It was a fun-filled few hours for those who joined.
We’re excited to announce that the Black Digital Migration Project page is live on our website. There, you can find our interactive timeline which follows Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform formerly known as Twitter, a description of the research methods we employed, as well as some of the visualizations we developed from the data we collected. We plan to update the BDM Project webpage as we work towards publication over the next few months.