Three years. Three cities. One question that keeps getting more urgent: who owns Black data — and who gets to decide? WOBD III lands in New Orleans this May 20–22, hosted by the Amistad Research Center on its 60th anniversary. The public evening is May 21, it’s free, and everyone is welcome.

James Earl Jones brings Frederick Douglass’s searing 1852 oration “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” to life—forcing a reflection on liberty, hypocrisy, and the ongoing struggle for justice. A must-watch for #FourthOfJuly and everyday. youtu.be/xX-AlsQcZgs?...

What can small data tell us about the quotidian impacts of limited scale representation in the aftermath of trauma and erasure? Catch me next month as I present and discuss “Beyond A Haunting,” a project centering histories of indenture and belonging.

Can I even conjure a self, a re-presentation of myself without a reference to my ancestors? “These people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life” (Morrison, “The Site of Memory” 95) and as I am, they are.

Nadejda Jahi Webb + Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez: “We bear witness to the geopolitical shifts that have left the worlds most vulnerable populations exposed to the disabling forces of war, white supremacy, genocide, enclosure, famine, disappearance, and destierro.”

Zophia Edwards, Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago (Duke University Press, 2025) Another excellent book indexed by Southwest Humanities is Zophia Edwards's Fueling Development: How Black Radical Trade Unionism Transformed Trinidad and Tobago (Duke…

In "Fueling Development," Zophia Edwards traces Trinidad and Tobago’s democratic and redistributive development success to a specific form of Black radical working-class mobilization she calls “liberation unionism.” Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/94DOWp1

Check it out. Frederik built a static site/minicomp digital collection using Pelican. For the Python crew.

Agreed.

Not sure, we'll succeed in setting up all 4 rituals, but we already got (b) and (c) in the cue, and have done one of (d). ¡Si se puede!

In our dept we're reviving the art of sharing dissertations in progress as a collective. We're aiming for 4 rituals to mark and celebrate a grad's progress together: a) A collective bibliography for their orals/prospectus; b) A chapter slam; c) An open defense; d) An invite back after they leave.

Ooo, I just realized that apple's embedding viz package can be used for even tabular data. The more you know!

Who Owns Black Data at CumbreAfro 2026!!! open.substack.com/pub/lifexcod...

RECAP: Black Beyond Data at the CumbreAfro in Puerto Rico open.substack.com/pub/lifexcod...

Ecosystem Notes: What's the Plan? Toni Cade Bambara Weekend Events for College Students, Spring Research Celebration Reveal, and more open.substack.com/pub/lifexcod...

Save the Date! Who Owns Black Data III: The Fight for Black Futures open.substack.com/pub/lifexcod...

On April 10th &11th, join us for "What's The Plan?" // Toni Cade Bambara in Praxis Weekend: Lessons in Care, Sisterhood, and Cultural Work open.substack.com/pub/lifexcod...

Find our latest Spotlight Interview with Awa Diagne Lô on our Substack! The polyglot co-founder of the Translation Lab in the DSL encourages us to "be aware of the responsibility to speak, or to stay silent, and how powerful that choice is." Full interview: lifexcode.substack.com/p/dive-into-...

A new Substack post from Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil reflects on how powerful mentorship and recognizing the breadth of labor is in creating community-based digital humanities projects. lifexcode.substack.com/p/the-many-h...

Join us on May 14th to hear from a lineup of dynamic presenters on critical questions on Black Kinship and AI!

Dive into the Ecosystem and meet Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil! K4BL’s Digital Curation Fellow tells us about scholarly confidence, her connections to the American Southwest, and why she starts all of her conference presentations with Langston Hughes. open.substack.com/pub/lifexcod...

Join us at the Who Owns Black Data? Conference on May 14th to hear from a lineup of dynamic experts on Black ancestry, memorialization, and descendant engagement! 🖤 Register here: wobd.blackbeyonddata.org

The WOBD conference is so excited to welcome an amazing roster of speakers for three panels + a keynote dialogue. Check out this list of powerhouse thinkers and doers shaping the conversation on Black data:

Join us on May 14th at Who Owns Black Vol. 2: The Past in Danger for a dynamic keynote conversation featuring Tamara Lanier, Yeshimabeit Milner, Alondra Nelson, and Marisa Parham, with an introduction by Kim Gallon. Register here❗️ www.eventbrite.com/e/wobd2-rece...

What: 𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐎𝐰𝐧𝐬 𝐁𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚? A̶r̶c̶h̶i̶v̶a̶l̶ ̵R̶e̶p̶a̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̵The Past in Danger When: May 14, 2025 Where: Yale University

Everything that's going on won't stop me from being immensely proud to announce the launch of the 8th issue of archipelagos journal. In this special issue we highlight papiamentu and the ABD islands. With deep gratitude for our guest editor Margo Groenewoud. Enjoy! archipelagosjournal.org

This spring, Keywords for Black Louisiana hosted an incubator on African and African diaspora history. Thank you to our Scholar Specialists who joined us to think deeply over the course of a Saturday about nation, ethnicity, Blackness and gender!

“Mannie Fresh, aka Elvis Freshley.” Love rap and hip hop? Check out the NOLA Hip Hop and Bounce Archive, housed by Black Beyond Data partner organization @amistadresearch.bsky.social + the Tulane University Digital Library.

“I challenge myself to go to the archive and not presume anything. I don’t presume that Blackness is ‘X.’ What are people of African descent telling me about what it means to be African?” - Jessica Marie Johnson (Associate Professor, History, Johns Hopkins Univ. + Executive Director of LifexCode)

Black Beyond Data Predoctoral fellow and 2024-25 Lord Baltimore Fellow Michael Guy will be giving a talk TODAY, titled “Hampton: Resistance and Control on an Antebellum Maryland Plantation.” Registration Link in our Bio❗️

Mark your calendars! It’s here: the Spring 2025 LifexCode Research Celebration on April 22!!!🌻✨

Congratulations to K4BL members Jamya Davis, Nyla Williams, and Zaria Sawdijah El-Fil for representing the team at the Nineteenth Century Studies Forty-Sixth Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA this past weekend! 🌻✨

The Translation Lab sustains textual solidarities and radical witnessing. We are translating passages from Ama Ata Aidoo’s “Changes: A Love Story.”

Keywords in Practice: K4BL Witnessing Black Life & Community Sponsored by UVA's Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship in Caribbean Literatures, in association with the Scholars' Lab, and the Departments of English; Africana Studies; History; and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

New Orleans Book Fest this weekend: "Imani Perry joins Freddi Williams Evans, Annette Gordon-Reed and Jessica Marie Johnson in a conversation about the complexities of Black women’s lives in the Atlantic World."      bookfest.tulane.edu/schedule/bla...

Congratulations to Skylar Jones, K4BL Digital Assistant for Editorial Markup and sophomore at the University of Notre Dame! She and Aislinn Fernandes, also a UND sophomore, presented research on how socioeconomic background affects patient mobility during childbirth.

The second installment of the Who Owns Black Data? conference series is coming soon! Our initial offering took place at Johns Hopkins and this time around we are at Yale. Please join us! Mark your 📅🎉: May 13–14, 2025 @ Yale University

As the gov is bent on destroying our heritage and research institutions, our original question becomes even more urgent. Witherto the future of the Black historical record? Join @jmjafrx.bsky.social, @nadejdaishawebb.bsky.social, Sasha White and a powerhouse of talent in May. #wobdyale

SAVE THE 📅! Prof. Adderley, Associate Professor of History at Tulane University, will give a talk titled “Aduma’s Colonial Archive: African Social Networks and Early Caribbean Abolition” for the Johns Hopkins Digital Humanities Workshop Series.

Learn more about the artists we celebrated at the Baltimore Museum of Art for their works for Slavery in Motion with remains // an archive with a new in-depth interview on our Substack! lifexcode.substack.com/p/diving-dee...

Dive into the ecosystem and meet Cyntoya McCall with a new interview on our Substack! She told us about her passion for educating about the African diaspora in South America, her love for champeta music, and her secret talent as a roller skater! lifexcode.substack.com/p/dive-into-...

SAVE THE 📅! Prof. Adderley, Associate Professor of History at Tulane University, will give a talk titled “Aduma’s Colonial Archive: African Social Networks and Early Caribbean Abolition” for the Johns Hopkins Digital Humanities Workshop Series.

Missed the Slavery in Motion event featuring Remains // an archive, artists Julia Mallory, Romaine McNeil, Sha-Shonna Rogers, and Tatiana Esh, and Professor Jessica Johnson @jmjafrx.bsky.social ? You can read a recap now on our Substack: lifexcode.substack.com/p/recap-slav...

Upcoming event! Explore and engage with Keywords for Black Louisiana, a digital project which uses the scholarship of Black feminist scholars, historians, and public intellectuals to center Black and Indigenous life in French and Spanish colonial archives dating from 1714 to 1803.

Happening in ONE hour on Zoom: Data Stewardship and Black DH: Researching and Building K4BL! Register here: dataservices.library.jhu.edu/love-data-we...

We've been celebrating JH Love Data Week over on our Instagram! Learn why some of the members of Keywords for Black Louisiana love data, and tune in to their panel "Data Stewardship and Black DH: Researching and Building K4BL" TOMORROW, Feb 13 @ 10 AM ET! dataservices.library.jhu.edu/love-data-we...

“Should a Black woman’s dreams for New Orleans youth be sacrificed to pay debts owed by the Archdiocese of New Orleans related to the decades-long sex abuse scandal?”

Join Black World Seminar on February 11th, 12 - 2:00 pm, to celebrate the publication of Computational Humanities (2024), the first volume to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities.

@blkstudies-podcast.bsky.social Artists and curators Romaine McNeil, Tatiana Esh, Sha-Shonna Rogers, Julia Mallory, and Jessica Newby discuss the exhibit Slavery in Motion. Listen on most platforms or here on Apple Podcasts: tinyurl.com/4z8y6n8u