“Who Owns Black Data?” The Case for Black Digital Humanities and an Ethic of Recovery, Redress, and Reciprocity | Week 4 of History in the Digital Age
This week in the course I am taking, History in the Digital Age, we are focusing on Black Digital Data. One of the key questions that has come up in the readings and a keynote we watched is “who owns Black Data?” I thought a lot about this question prior to reading the articles and watching the keynote in the module (list below). My initial reaction was that I did not know. I was not sure how to respond to this question because the thought of data in general is so multifaceted and layered that it does not seem that any singular person or entity can “own” data. What do I mean by this? Well, data comes from something or someone. In my previous research, the data I used came from personal papers in an institutional archive where an individual (or multiple individuals) put these personal papers together in a specific format and order. I then used that data, as an historian, to tell a story. And maybe, at some point, others will use what I have written with that data to expand that story. So who does this data belong to in that layered use of data? In the end, I was not sure I had a clear answer.
I decided to complete the readings prior to watching the keynote assigned. The decision was to go in chronological order. In the readings, some key quotes that stood out to me when thinking about the question of “Who owns Black Data?” For example, Jessica Marie Johnson, in the article, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads” quotes Saidiya Hartman, “History is how the secular world attends to the dead.” Johnson also quotes Vincent Brown, “Archives are not just the records bequeathed to us by the past.” Kim Gallon, in the 2016 piece, "Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” quotes Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips when Gallon termed “Black Digital Humanities”- “putting a name to the unnamed helps bring a concept into existence.” The authors also used some key phrases that stood out to me as well, including “recovery,” “discovery,” and “technology of recovery.” All of these quotes and key terms together really emphasizes the responsibility of using and constructing data. For example, how can digital historians use and present this data, but do so ethically? The articles give me quite a bit of insight to this: involve communities, make voices heard, be transparent and reflective, follow an interdisciplinary approach, really think about how data is being used- is it functioning to tell about everyday lives without leaving these lives “faceless, anonymous, disembodied” (Johnson 64)? But after reading all the assigned articles, I still felt like the answer to “Who owns Black Data” was not quite clear. Can anyone truly own data? The answer came with the keynote assigned. I have to turn to Bilphena Yahwon to answer this question because Yahwon, from my perspective, answers the question and answers it well. In the closing event/keynote discussion of the “Who Owns Black Data?” Yahwon states, “the concept of owning Black Data is problematic” and “it cannot be owned.” Archivists, historians, scholars, community members- whomever, cannot own Black data. With that said, however, these individuals, as Yahwon states, can be and are stewards, stewards to present, preserve, and more.
To end, a particular digital history project I would like to highlight that feels relevant to this discussion is Bending Toward Justice: Black Life in Florida. I must and will be transparent and state this is a project I previously worked on, thus I have a bias. With that said, I would still like to highlight the project because I believe it is a project that has led with what the articles discussed as key to using and presenting the data.
Works Watched & Read for Class
Who Owns Black Data Conference, Keynote Conversation and Closing Event, Johns Hopkins University, March 29, 2024.
2016: Kim Gallon, "Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities, " Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016.
2018: Jessica Marie Johnson, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." Social Text 1 December 2018; 36 (4 (137)): 57–79.
2019: Safiya Umoja Noble, "Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities," in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.
2022: Julian C. Chambliss and Scot A. French “A Generative Praxis: Curation, Creation, and Black Counterpublics,” in Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, Vol. 39 (2022).
