This seven-person roundtable brings together the team from “The Revue des Colonies” with co-editors of the microedition of "Kinship and Longing: Keywords for Black Louisiana" to discuss experiences working with TEI and make the case for modifications to better accommodate representation of Black life in slavery's archives and translation of language of race and empire in the colonial archive.
The Revue des Colonies project focuses on the eponymous journal, edited by Martinican abolitionist Cyrille Bissette. Published between 1834 and 1842, it was the first French periodical for and by people of color. Its monthly issues provided news about ongoing struggles for civil rights across the French colonial world and beyond, alongside original and reprinted fiction and poetry by global Black writers. Led by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars including project director Maria Beliaeva Solomon, technical director Raffaele Viglianti and co-editor and translator Grégory Pierrot, the project to digitally annotate and translate this invaluable record of the global history of colonization, enslavement and abolition emerged in response to the absence of any complete and searchable collection, let alone translation, of the journal's complete print run. Supported by the Foundation for the Remembrance of Slavery, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library), the National Archives, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project aims to restore the emancipatory rhetoric of the Revue des Colonies within the political, material, and cultural contexts of its publication and make it accessible to new generations.
At the heart of this endeavor lies the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which serves as "technology of recovery," as articulated by Kim Gallon in “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities'' (Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2016). TEI not only facilitates the digitization process but also becomes an instrument to guard against the unwitting reproduction of power dynamics embedded within the original texts. Building upon the imperative articulated by Kelly Baker Josephs and Roopika Risam in their introduction to The Digital Black Atlantic to resist technology's historical perpetuation of dominant narratives of oppression, our edition's critical apparatus aims to highlight the original contributions of Black authors, editors, journalists and activists to the political and cultural transformations of the nineteenth century. Our TEI customization focuses on the encoding of named entities in order to provide contextual and critical annotation. The tagging features provide a perfect opportunity to create substantial, and cross navigable entries for individuals, events, and organizations that have been overlooked in scholarly discourse. To increase accessibility to the Revue sources, we also provide professional English translations.
On the Keywords side, beginning in Fall of 2020, with the leadership and collaboration of founding director Jessica Marie Johnson, guidance of Alex Gil, and editorial assistance of Raffaele Viglianti, Leila Blackbird, Olivia Barnard, Emma Katherine Bilski, and Ellie Palazzolo began working on a microedition for the journal Scholarly Editing (https://scholarlyediting.org/). The vision was to edit and publish a handful of documents from eighteenth-century colonial Louisiana—transcribed and translated via the Louisiana Historical Center Colonial Documents Digitization Project—to draw attention to stories of African and African-descended people in that archive. Keywords for Black Louisiana is supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
The team has edited fifteen stories composed of twenty-one documents spanning from 1740 to 1795, bridging French and Spanish colonialism in Louisiana and reflected carefully on the possibilities and limitations of TEI. Some of the original documents are in French and others are in Spanish. All have been transcribed and translated into English. The transcriptions and translations are marked up in TEI. The primary tags used are <persName> to identify named and unnamed individuals and <seg> with @ana for Keywords. One cornerstone presentation on Black DH and TEI, Caitlin Pollock and Jessica Lu's 2019 talk "Hacking TEI for Black Digital Humanities," influenced the Keywords project's approach to textual encoding early on in the editorial process. Pollock and Lu invited editors to work with TEI on Black history and archives to push some of the boundaries and conventions that the dictionary so meticulously documents. We encountered a number of questions and roadblocks that validated Pollock and Lu's call, and did a bit of hacking ourselves that we propose to present at the annual meeting while speculating on and encouraging further formal interventions in TEI.
By bringing together these two projects, we aim to foster conversation about how TEI can become more accountable to critical, postcolonial, and Black DH. We will build on the similarities and shared challenges and commitments as well as the differences between these two archives towards a far-reaching set of interventions. We propose additions to the TEI dictionary related to representation and translation of racialized language, to print as well as manuscript documents, and to documents written by and for as well as documents written about Black actors.
