"Who Owns Black Data?" The Case for Black Digital Humanities and an Ethic of Recovery, Redress, and Reciprocity

    This week's material I have struggled to completely grasp, but I believe that that is more to the testament of how complex a question "who owns black data?" is than my own inability to understand (I hope). I think it is best to begin with the definition of what "black data" is. According to Jessica Johnson, data is "... an objective and independent unit of knowledge". I think it would then be safe to assume that "black data" is objective units of knowledge that pertain to Africana/African American/Black studies (from here on I will shorthand this to just Black studies, like Kim Gallon did in her chapter). 

    The question of ownership of black data is hard to answer because of a few reasons. Like many authors have pointed out, historical works, than being by print/digital projects as well as archives, are inherently racialized. Jessica Johnson mentions that "... blackness is most often constructed in proximity to bondage and the rise of Atlantic slaving...". To this point, I believe that Dorothy Berry, Bilphena Yahwon, and Dr. Jennifer Morgan brought up a similar point in regards to physical archives. Johnson's point identifies that the type of black data being stored, which is usually stored (and perhaps "owned") by white digital historians, is data about how Africans were dehumanized. The three keynote speakers I mentioned before for the "Who Owns Black Data?" event explain how in physical archives, black historians have to put on facades, such as claiming to be genealogist instead of historians, to get access to certain archives. Berry sheds more light on this because of her experience as an archivist. She elaborates that many archivist do know everything that the archive has to offer which makes it hard for them to pull out material for a historian asking questions that the may be unconventional in regards to how the archive is sorted. Bilphena talks about how physical archives are filled with sources that may not directly pertain to black people, and that the archives are set up deliberately in a way guided by hidden politics. Continuing with the problems with the structure of physical archives, Dr. Morgan shares how she was turned away from many archives while she was doing work on enslaved women in the 1750s. She then goes on to say that their was data that was useful to her in these archives that she found later, but because the questions she asked were more unconventional it was harder for archivists to give her a selection of material or point her in a direction where she might find helpful resources. This is partially because, connecting back to Johnson's quote, it was hard to identify sources that were outright about enslaved women.

 I interpreted this portion of the conversation as many physical archives are structured behind hidden political agendas that revolve around white sources. Archivist who have to be knowledgeable about most of the archives collections do not have time to deeply analyze every source. As such, these archivist rely on how documents and sources are sorted to point researchers in the right direction. However, when these sources are sorted in a way that may exclude black data, that data can be "whitewashed" just by its categorization. An example of this could be a newspaper from 1812 that announces war had been declared on Britain and also contains an ad for a slave auction occurring on the weekend. There is a good possibility that that newspaper would be sorted by its headline of the war of 1812, and the black data on that sheet would be hidden until a researcher who cares about that data finds it. (This is not a real example, this is just something I made up. And I apologize for using slavery to bring up black data after I just talked about how blackness is largely associated with the Atlantic slave trade... but I think it proves Johnson's point even more if my made up example for black data references slavery).

    This is all to say that both black data at this moment is owned by a lot of different people and the ownership of that data is dynamic. I believe it was important to talk about the physical archives because much of what is in those archives will eventually be digitized. If physical archives are racialized, there is a great possibility their digital archives will be as well. Ethically, it is important for archivists and digital historians to be more mindful of black data, and how certain sources can contribute to the ever-growing collection of black data that is on the internet. I really liked Bilphena's description of Archive Liberia, the project she is a founder of. She explained that the archive started as a personal memory project for her and her family that lost much of their history in the Liberian civil wars. The project has grown, however, as she began to work with other Liberians to reconstruct their memories of their families and of Liberia. The part I think that resonates the most is that she is transparent about the political agenda of the archive. She transparent that there is Communist, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist propaganda in the archive because she recognizes that archives are apolitical, and while other archives might have hidden politics, she is trying to be upfront about her biases. To end off, I would like to highlight Dr. French's Vinegar Hill Memoryscape. While it is defunct, it was a project that worked with the African American community of Charlottesville, Virginia to preserve the once thriving community that was forcibly gentrified after civil leaders called for the city to be demolished and redeveloped. What this project highlights is how black data can be collected and displayed in an ethical way. With genuine interest in the community and the collaboration between French, archivists, and the community, black data was able to be brought to the forefront of the project. Voices and photographs from the past combined with oral histories from people who had to move because of the demolition show that black data is not stagnant or confined to being hidden away by a secret political agenda in an archive somewhere. This project, and many others, are making attempts to humanize black data and collecting new black data to incorporate into their digital history projects that can be used by future historians.