Book release: Regenerated Identities - Documenting African Lives
Environments of Change project co-investigator, Paul Lovejoy's latest collaborative project titled "Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives" will be coming out later this year.
Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives, is an edited volume on African digital humanities that highlights the use of computing technologies to store, organize, examine and analyze African history, culture, and the arts. The volume brings together descriptions of projects that use independent or collaborative digital data management tools, or analog practices for digital humanities databases and website creation. The contributors want to shift the meaning of African Digital Humanities away from terminologies that describe people as “data” to acknowledge the actual lives of individuals in digital form. In 2011, the UN declared the slave trade a crime against humanity, which in the case of Africa involved 12.8 million individuals who embarked on vessels to work in the slave societies of the Americas. One of the most egregious after-effects of this barbaric forced migration was the attempt to erase the identities of millions of people who were taken from their homes and forced into slavery, their names changed, and their birth places and family ties hidden in personal memory that eroded over the centuries. The legacy of forgetting has been foundational to human rights abuses, inequity, and social injustices in Africa and in the former slave colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, and despite repeated calls for reparations continue to define contemporary society. In this volume, we explore the “digital identities” of these individuals, who were not numbers that comprise “data” in research studies but actual people whose lives matter.
The trajectory from data extraction and curation to the analysis of digital identities challenges our methodological paradigm. Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Livesfocuses on understanding the interaction of human lives by organizing surviving information on individuals in a manner that allows disseminating knowledge. The digitization of original source documents, meta-tagging and online presentation via websites enables the mobilization of new knowledge that students and the public can explore in unique and creative ways. The contributions to the volume reveal novel approaches in reconstructing a past that repeatedly has been suppressed and denied. Those who access these projects want to address questions that relate to individual lives. The contributors strongly promote the possibilities of cross-referencing across web-based platforms that transcend databases to reveal digital identities. We intend this volume to explain various user-end search functionalities of digital platforms by demonstrating how specific projects undertake digital research. The volume is tailored to represent various African digital humanities studies, documenting the strategies for information retrieval, and how to understand questions from a historian’s point-of-view, as made accessible by computer experts.
Paul Lovejoy has edited this volume with Henry Lovejoy, Kartikay Chadha, Erika Melek Delgado.