Jewon Woo

“From Archival Absence to Digital Presence” investigates the Black press in nineteenth-century Ohio through archival research and digital humanities tools to illuminate its distinctively collaborative editorship. This interdisciplinary study challenges the racially discriminatory practice of the archive in the process of preservation and digitization, curates the under-studied Black press to reconsider it in literary study, and produces both a scholarly journal article and a website that uses digital techniques for text analysis and data visualization as an open source for the learning public. This study gives insight into overlooked historic texts through the humanistic use of digital technology to show the dynamics and complexity of early African American communal life.

“Lost and Found” examines how African Americans in the nineteenth century interacted with Black newspapers, expanding the concepts of kinship and intimacy that shaped the Black liberation movement emanating from within the domestic sphere. While it is widely recognized that early Black newspapers functioned as political tools to advance civil rights, this project goes beyond their role in achieving immediate political goals. African Americans engaged with these newspapers to envision their personal and private experiences within the broader communal context of society, nurturing a sense of citizenship even at home. They cultivated a personal life that served as a foundation for political organizing and the pursuit of full citizenship. Ensuring emotional vitality through kinship and intimacy signaled their humanity, autonomy, and personhood. Black newspapers played a crucial role in empowering personal sentiments and desire for intimate connection, transforming these into forces for building a community of care through collective empathy, resilience, and interdependence. The project argues that, through their newspapers, African Americans envisioned home as a site for cultivating their sociopolitical life despite the government’s failure to sanction Black full citizenship.