Black Women Making Place in Nineteenth- Century Newspapers

Abstract

This essay argues that letters to the editor are modes of “life storying” that document individual and collective makings of place as a collective Black feminist activism and politics. Using data visualization as a method of research and protocol of reading enables one to see that recalibrating how letters to the editor are understood, from a focus on the individual to one on the collective, reveals their political work across space and scale in the early to late nineteenth century. But digital humanities tools, such as data visualization, need to be used with attention to the foundational assumptions that underlie them and will not, alone, necessarily produce readings that put the individual and collective in generative dialogue. Rather, interscale readings that combine both foundational and new reading methodologies in the humanities may reveal more about Black women’s lives through this press form they used.