Who's HiPS? Plain Sight Histories of Slavery

Abstract

Who's HiPS?Plain Sight Histories of Slavery Jessica Marie Johnson (bio) The inaugural OI Reader born-digital article, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica" ("HiPS"), is less a publication and more a digital project. In this, "HiPS" succeeds where digital versions of print books and articles often fail. Instead of attempting to replicate the analog journal article, to shrink, contort, and stretch it for small and mid-sized screens, "HiPS" plays with all of the tools the digital humanities has to offer. Images, video, audio recordings, music, maps, and 3-D technology all make an appearance in this fascinating and impactful study of free and enslaved life at the height of slave society in Jamaica. Created by Simon P. Newman, David Ely, Anthony King, and Marenka Thompson-Odlum, it is populated by a cast of characters and performers from across time and space, including Isaac Bernard, Kenneth Bilby, Curtis Brett Sr., Olaudah Equiano, the Moore Town Maroons, William Mulligan, Edward Seaga, Matthew Strickland, Thomas Thistlewood, Gameli Kodzo Tordzro, field workers in Saint James Parish, Jamaica, in the 1980s, families shopping in Coronation Market in Kingston in 2017, and a strategic handful of the hundreds of enslaved women, children, and men who escaped the carceral geographies of the plantation by absconding into forests, town-ships, and farms across the island. This list of names is long, and the project created out of this collaboration is richer as a result of these complex, multiple tiers of labor, conversation, and ideation. "HiPS" offers digital humanists of the historical ilk a model to follow as they brainstorm ways to bring the past to life using technological tools. At the same time, as a digital project, "HiPS" struggles with a tension digital humanists and historians of slavery share: Who is hidden in plain sight? This question is important and, in some ways, could only be provoked by the born-digital environment of "HiPS." The digital humanities is an endeavor that seeks to apply digital tools and technology to "long-standing values of the humanistic tradition: the pursuit of analytical acuity and clarity, the making of effective arguments, the rigorous use of evidence, and [End Page 15] communicative expressivity and efficacy."1 Over the last decade, it has struggled to reconcile the ethics, priorities, and principles of humanistic study in professional scholarly spaces with the public-facing imperative and communal reality of new media.2 In other words, the digital projects, applications, and open source resources historians offer the world are also public products, community artifacts, and, at their best, radical archives of thought accumulated beyond as well as within the walls of the ivory tower. The result of a powerful research and creative team, "HiPS" (and by association the OI Reader) could offer a critical and radical challenge to the tradition of single-author publishing in the historical profession. It could disrupt the discipline's lukewarm acceptance of collaboration by embracing the project team model increasingly common across the digital humanities. In a beautiful and inclusive way, adding site credits—perhaps accompanying the article as a final page beyond the last page of full text, as well as being accessible via a button on the toolbar at the top of the reader window—would acknowledge the labor of everyone involved. Site credits seem like a small task, but a series of questions unfold when the power dynamics embedded in collaboration are taken seriously: Did undergraduate or graduate students do research for the article? Which librarians and archivists helped produce the work? Who was on the digital and technical team designing the 3-D maps charting Dr. John Quier's route across the island? "HiPS" has the potential to disrupt citation practice for historians of slavery even further by bringing past and present historical subjects into conversation with each other. The video of James Hakewill's painting Harbour Street, Kingston offers a perfect example. As the "HiPS" team argues, appealing to white European audiences and the white British gaze in particular shaped how Jamaica was portrayed in paintings and sketches from the period of slavery. With Hakewill's original painting as a base image and using...