Tian Leng

March 21, 2020

Link to the digital Archive: https://ecda.northeastern.edu/

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a digital archive platform for pre-twentieth-century Caribbean archival texts (colonial Caribbean cultures and literary histories to be exact). The Northeastern University hosts the website that contains the archive. Most of the team members of this project are professors and students of Northeastern University’s English department, although they have backgrounds in cultural studies, history, digital humanities, network, and Caribbean studies. Nicole Aljoe and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon received a grant from Northeastern University to develop this digital archive. Aljoe and Dillon realize that many of the early Caribbean texts are collected in Europe and the United States, but some are still scattered across the globe. In order to make these materials more accessible to students and scholars, they found this digital archiving project necessary.

The several collections in ECDA categorize and store photo scans of texts as PDF. Careful digitalization and metadata curation of these texts enable the user to search keywords and even words in the documents. The scanned images are transformed into “editable texts,” in which the user can search and copy characters from the texts. Therefore, the texts in ECDA are capable of electronic search. In the site’s contribution page, it is written on the contribution form that digital images of texts should be at least 300 PPI so that the submitted images can be considered of high quality. In the essay “Electronic Scholarly Editing” of A Companion to Digital Humanities, Martha Nell Smith points out that “high-quality color images of a writer’s manuscripts offer a more ample sense of their textual conditions, including the conditions of the writing scene in which they were produced.” The color scans of ECDA faithfully preserve the extratextual physical details that are required for documentary editing.

Each text in ECDA has its page, which contains its metadata, file link, copyright information, and an abstract. However, some of the texts have an additional scholarly annotation that introduces the cultural and historical settings of the text and the author describes its different editions throughout history and gives a brief literature review. This scholarly annotation makes it a critical edition. The “exhibits” section of the website also serves as an introduction to some specific groups of texts in this archive. Being different from a scholarly annotation/introduction, the opening of an exhibit is more a map for a group of texts: it starts with a short introduction to the collection and continues with introductions to the individual texts with hyperlinks that can direct the reader to pages in the archive. The editability of the digital archive also allows the collections to expand, not only in the quantity of texts, but also in scholarly annotations. However, this digital archive has not fully explored its multimedia capability. The exhibitions of music have only texts and scans of notes but no music files at all. If any contributors can find related music files in the public domain, they should add those supplemental materials to the collections and provide users with a multimedia experience of the pre-twentieth-century Caribbean history. In the “classroom” section of the site, two featured student projects, instead, use Google Maps to visualize literary history.

This site is for any students, teachers, and researchers who are interested in literary arts and history of this period. The digital archive is more accessible than a physical one, and it is able to draw materials from many different sources across the world. The “classroom” section offers various kinds of resources for them, especially syllabi, bibliographies, exemplary student projects. Although this archive is open-access, contributors to these pedagogical materials (not many in fact) seem to be limited to the faculty and students of Northeastern University.

The team claims to challenge the pre-established knowledge in a European colonial framework and decolonize the archive through “remix and reassembly.” They seek to dig out hidden materials, and review, question, and revise the existing knowledge structures in Caribbean Studies. A digital archive is what they find to be the mean of decolonization. Other than remediation, the team believes that their “nonlinear” organization of texts, which is from a traditional archive, can create new structures to house knowledge and allow texts and images to collide, grow, and evolve, eventually disrupt the colonial knowledge infrastructure for pre-twentieth-century Caribbean literary history. However, they have a lot of work in order to “reassembly,” and that includes adding many more materials from old and new resources, annotating the rest of the texts, locating and creating multimedia materials for the existing collections and exhibitions, and finally, inviting researchers and students from institutions other than Northeastern University to participate in this project.