Justice Forum: The Black Bibliography Project

A roundtable on the Black Bibliography Project. The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive and transform Descriptive Bibliography—the systematic description of print materials as physical objects—for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies. The project’s goal is to create a digital database whose capacities can reveal the dynamic social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and beyond. We believe that the digital environment is ideally suited for bibliographic information: unlike codex bibliographies, a digital bibliographic database can be queryable, expandable, revisable, and re-organizable (no longer ordered only by the lives of authors); it could include images of covers, illustrations, and vital bibliographic details; it could also be crowd-sourced and publicly accessible. By tapping the explanatory potential of digital technologies (specifically, the revolutionary metadata approach called “Linked Data”), we are building an electronic database whose networking capacities can reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora.