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.