Black Book Interactive Project

The Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) is the digital component of the History of Black Writing (HBW)  that endeavors to increase the number of Black-authored texts available for scholarly engagement and teaching. By generating a metadata schema that accounts for race and race-related issues, BBIP will correct the digital divide in Black-authored texts.

Archive:  Launched in 2010, and generously funded by the University of Kansas, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the HBW Novel Corpus has grown to over 7,000 Black-authored texts, making it the largest digital archive of its kind.

Scholars Program:  Since 2019, more than 50 scholars have participated across six different cohorts of the BBIP Scholars Program wherein they learn about the digital humanities and access the HBW Novel Corpus of Black-authored texts via PhiloLogic, a searchable online platform from the Textual Optics Lab at the University of Chicago.

Collaboration: 2022 saw the launch of the BBIP Scholars Program: Digital Publishing, a collaboration between HBW and Afro-Publishing Without Walls at the University of Illinois and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.  Scholars with digital humanities projects nearing the publication stage receive training on various digital publication platforms, support from a tech team on how to translate content to a digital space, and webinars and workshops on topics ranging from copyright laws to managing metadata. Ultimately, their digital publications will be peer reviewed, released to the public and featured here on this site. 

Learn more about BBIP’s history by reviewing the timeline & check out our HBW website: HBW