Black Book Interactive Project

Erin Wolfe is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Kansas, where he works with the Libraries on a variety of tasks involving the creation, access, and preservation of digital materials. His research interests include computational text analysis, text data mining and visualization, machine learning, and related areas.

Dhanashree Thorat (Ph.D. in English, University of Florida) is a postdoctoral researcher in Digital Humanities at the University of Kansas. Her research is situated at the intersection of Asian American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Digital Humanities, and her work examines the effect of colonial and racial ideologies in shaping the technological imagination, specifically in digital infrastructures, platforms, and policies. Her current work focuses on how Muslims use hashtag activism to intervene in public conversations about their racialized bodies. Dhanashree is a founding Executive Council member of the Center for Digital Humanities, Pune in India. She serves as the lead organizer for a winter school on Digital Humanities, and advises the center on digital archival projects and DH curriculum development.

Brian Rosenblum is Founding Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, and Librarian for Digital Scholarship at the University of Kansas Libraries, where he has administrative, production and outreach responsibilities in support of a variety of digital initiatives and publishing services. Brian is a member of the executive board of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, a special interest group that works to help break down barriers that hinder communication and collaboration among researchers and students of the Digital Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage sectors in high, mid, and low income economies.

Kenton Rambsy received his PhD (May 2015) and Masters in English (May 2012) from the University of Kansas. He is a 2010 Magna Cum-Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Morehouse College. He finished Morehouse as the top ranking scholar in the English department and received the distinction of being named the 2010 William Pickens Scholar. In 2008, he received a UNCF/Mellon-Mays Fellowship, and in 2009, he received Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Fellowship. Having served as a research assistant at both Vanderbilt University's Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center in Nashville, Tennessee and Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2012- 2014, Kenton served as the Program Academic Committee chair for the Association for the Study of Life and African American History (ASALH). Kenton specializes in African American short stories, social geographies, and digital humanities) text-mining, topic modeling, and mapping softwares).

Howard Rambsy II teaches classes on African American and American literature, and he coordinates programs related to African American cultural history and experience. He has published articles about black poetry, Richard Wright, Colson Whitehead, and Aaron McGruder. His book, The Black Arts Enterprise, about the defining African American literary and cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2011.

Hoyt Long is associate professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (2012), and publishes widely in the fields of media history and cultural analytics. He co-founded the Chicago Text Lab with Richard Jean So and currently co-directs the Textual Optics Lab, which focuses on creating large-scale, multi-lingual text collections and developing tools to explore them. Recent publications include “Race, Writing, and Computation: Racial Difference and the US Novel, 1880-2000” (Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2019) and “Self-Repetition and East Asian Literary Modernity, 1900-1930” (Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2018). He is currently finishing a book manuscript, Figures of Difference, that reframes the history of modern Japanese literature through quantitative methods and their capacity to reason about difference across multiple scales.

Amy E. Earhart is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty of Africana Studies at Texas A&M University. A 2020 Texas A&M University Presidential Impact Fellow and a 2019 Texas A&M University Arts & Humanities Fellow, Earhart has participated in grants and fellowships received from the NEH, ACLS, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2020, Earhart received an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for her book-length digital project “Digital Humanities and the Infrastructures of Race in African-American Literature.” She has also won numerous teaching awards, including the University Distinguished Achievement Award from The Association of Former Students and Texas A&M University. Earhart has published scholarship on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes a monograph Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (U Michigan Press 2015), a co-edited collection The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (U Michigan Press 2010), and a number of articles and book chapters in volumes including the Debates in Digital Humanities series, DHQ, DSH: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, and Textual Cultures. Her current book, “A Compromised Infrastructure: Digital Humanities, African American Literary History and Technologies of Identity,” is under advance contract with Stanford University Press.

Jamene Brooks-Kieffer is the Data Services Librarian and Coordinator of Digital Scholarship at the University of Kansas Libraries. She has worked as a professional academic librarian since 2006. Prior to her current role in data services, she specialized in serials, electronic resources, and OpenURL linking. She holds degrees from Bryn Mawr College, the University of Mississippi, and Florida State University and is a certified Software Carpentry Instructor.