Where we Begin by Dr. Schuyler Esprit

The project began selfishly. For most of my career, I’ve been investigating literary culture in the Caribbean. As a literary historian I’ve been thinking about a question posed by the late George Lamming to whom this project is dedicated. He asked “for whom do we write?” Working on this question for more than twenty years led me to some interesting corners of the Caribbean social experience - book clubs and book tube, festivals and book fairs, newspapers and magazines, calypso and radio, school and home and church.

I posed this question to my students. I wanted their help in this investigation, asking them to reflect on their own coming of age and education, their reading practices and exposure to writing by Caribbean. What we learned together was unfortunately what I expected, that while they had read some interesting Caribbean writing during their school life, they had no idea about the history of and current global reach of literature from the region.

I wanted to do the same thing for a topic so beloved in my life and work that I had devoted to other important Caribbean studies topics in the history of Create Caribbean: to learn while teaching and to challenge and innovate on the ways we currently think about that phenomenon. More selfishly, I’m in the final phase of a long overdue book on this topic and the project was a way to get me to think about it all the time.

On a more human level, I wanted to share the joy and possibility that Caribbean literature has brought to my own professional and personal life with my students and this was the perfect time. So I wrote it into the course.

The Course

HIS115, Digital Humanities Research is the first digital humanities course offered at a Caribbean higher education institution. Now in its ninth year of being offered at Dominica State College, it is the foundational course for the internship’s academic curriculum. Digital Humanities Research is, as it suggests, a research course. This means it is reading and writing intensive. The course is generally organized into four units: The first focuses on cultures of technology and how the digital has changed the way we live and think. The second is on the great debates in digital humanities as a field of study - why, how and where digital humanities better helps us understand the way we experience the world.

The third unit is on digital tools and methods - the actual experimenting, building and playing with tools to assess how they can enhance our research and the fourth unit is a deep study of a topic in Caribbean studies for critical inquiry. In the past the course topic has been Dominica’s history, Caribbean climate, political movements of the region, among others. The rest of the course is devoted to bringing all the units together through collaboration and practical application.

The Research

We had to formulate research questions that would critically explore the history of literature in the Caribbean and lead us to expected and unexpected findings.

What is Caribbean literature? What works and authors are included or excluded and why? How has Caribbean literature influenced the social landscape of the Caribbean, particularly in the 20th-21st century, and vice versa? Who defines what constitutes the Caribbean, and how? How is Caribbean literature implicated in the shaping of definitions of the Caribbean? How has Caribbean literature as a broad category influenced global perspectives about the Caribbean and its people?

The Search Process

Set the scope: what locations will we include in our consideration of the Caribbean? Find the material: where will we look? Where should we look? Look everywhere - and we do mean everywhere - to identify as many primary source texts as possible.

We searched by date

Each intern was assigned a time period to begin the search process. The 19th century was assigned in 30-year intervals and the 20th and 21st centuries were assigned by decade. Each intern clipped and

We searched by language

We would begin with the languages most widely and formally spoken in the region - Spanish, English, French, Dutch and Haitian Creole. Then we would use a system of snowballing to identify and document texts in other languages of the region as we encountered them in the searches.

We searched by genre

We also made a list of creative expressions of Caribbean writing that we were interested in documenting. We knew we would not include secondary sources such as academic books or textbooks, but wanted to consider a broad range that targeted readers of all ages. We looked for the following:

  • Fiction (Novel/Novella)
  • Fiction (Short Story Collection)
  • Poetry Collections
  • Drama
  • Short Stories
  • Poems
  • Essays
  • Nonfiction Books
  • Biography
  • Autobiography/Memoir
  • Anthology

We also considered our interests in the outcomes of our study. What did we hope to achieve by collecting this data? Certainly, we wanted to have a solid dataset that we could make available to scholars, students and a wider public. But we also wanted students like us and even younger to get to experience what we did during the course of this project - to get to know the depth and breadth of literature about people like us by people like us. From our small island villages to more bustling cities like Havana and Kingston, we wanted to know more about

  • Texts
  • Writers
  • Readers
  • Scenes
  • Relations
  • Occasions for Reading

In all these places, books and stories circulate and we want to know why, when, where and how.

Then we played. Once we amassed the big, not-so-smart data for the project, we cleaned it up and looked for patterns based on the project’s goals.

Research Goals

Then we developed research goals to guide our process of investigation. These goals involved different categories.

The Data What data sets may we be interested in? How do we locate the data/sets? How do we store and catalog data?

The Tools What are the most appropriate tools to learn more about the data/sets? What are the challenges, limitations and obstacles to using specific tools? Which tools will allow for the project’s longevity and sustainability?

The Critical Methods What literary approaches are we applying to our understanding of the data and of the visualizations that emerge from our engagement with the data? What are our broad research questions about the Caribbean, literature, and Caribbean culture, based on what we find in the data?

We wanted to capture the vastness of the Caribbean - and of definitions of the Caribbean - in the representations within the literature so we also wanted to capture the details of their stories. We considered…

Periodization: the eras of literary production and main events, theories, values People: the authors, readers, publishers, communities documented in literature Infrastructure: the means and context of literary production, consumption, and reception Places: the cartography of stories and storytelling within and about the Caribbean Themes: the keywords emerging from the subjects and ideas relevant to primary sources

We aggregated 3913 entries in Zotero before moving on to the next phase of project development. These entries do not represent the entirety of the work about the Caribbean but form a solid data set to begin work. After additions, deletions, editorial changes, the Google spreadsheet now has 3700 entries that reflect works by Caribbean authors in their new editions and translated iterations. At our last count, we produced autor data sheets for 232 unique authors or co-authors. We have represented 46 in this beta version of the project and will continue the work of adding more to the visualization as our work continues. From the 46 authors prepared for today, there are 445 translated works represented in their bibliographies.

Working Together

We also had to make decisions about DH tools and methods. Our goal was to apply the experimental, collaborative and persistent spirit of Create Caribbean toward the best critical engagement with the data that we could.

To facilitate the collaboration, Dr. Esprit asked interns to organize themselves into three teams based on their skills and interests - Tech Team, Geo Team and Research Team. She then worked with these smaller groups to reinforce instruction of methods and tools already taught during the course and to introduce new tools and methods that we could experiment with, for this project and our individual projects.

Each of the teams would have a role to play in the final project, whether it was perfecting HTML or geocoding data or fact finding to ensure the accuracy of the data in our spreadsheet. As we got deeper into the project our roles transformed. Teams learned skills from each other, interns became leaders or individual contributors to specialized tasks and everyone started learning more about what they liked, what they were good at and what they didn’t know was possible.

The Technology Process

Visualizing Caribbean Literature is a static site with dynamic content. We were inspired by the code base of the In the Same Boats project, pioneered by Alex Gil and Kaiama L. Glover, two of the Co-PIs of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective. We were also interested in the styling and presentation of the Mapping Marronage project by Dr. Annette Joseph-Gabriel, whose work also modifies the Same Boats code. We were warned that it was a complex code and would probably need the help of a paid professional to pull it off. But we wanted to try anyway. And we had success.

Dr Esprit and Josh Bazil wrote and modified the Google scripts and the Python script to extract the data from the Google Sheets and to process them according to the various categories. With the help of some external supporters including Dominican web developer Arthur Pemberton, they were able to complete that section of the project and move to the visualization.

That’s when trouble came. Browser content security policies made it difficult and sometimes impossible to test the javascript functions in real time. We were stalled. So we went where all the best DH-ers go - to Alex.

This was a moment of failing in the right direction. We did very good work but we learned two lessons: we would not have time or skill set to get through this hurdle in time for the symposium and we also did not necessarily need all the features of Same Boats in order to visualize our content. This is a lesson often learned in digital humanities, what we think we will do and what we end up doing often look nothing alike.

Dr. Gil suggested starting over with a Jekyll frame with bootstrap properties, developed a few years after Jekyll was first released to provide the minimalism and security of Jekyll with the flexibility and interactivity of content management platforms like Wordpress and Omeka. Our final product therefore was a test of all the skills and knowledge in the digital humanities course at the eleventh hour. Dr. Esprit built the framework, layouts and leaflet maps from scratch and processed the data using the python script. We then worked to build pages for authors and countries to visualize bibliographies and other relevant data. Our current project is a combination of code and lessons learned from the Same Boats project, JavaScript code templates that allowed for accessible visualizations and new code written to meet our specific needs.

Digital Tools and Methods

The following programming languages and techniques were used in the development of what we will present to you today.

  • Python
  • Javascript
  • Bootstrap
  • Liquid
  • HTML and CSS

We also needed the following software and digital tools to process data or load the project:

  • Jekyll
  • Zotero
  • Google Sheets
  • Google Apps Scripts
  • Github
  • Leaflet
  • Voyant Tools
  • ArcGIS

We hope you will be as excited about this project as we have been about putting it together. We are proud and excited to present to you Visualizing Caribbean Literature.