Cultural Front

Monday, February 16, 2026

Book Notes

• Book Notes: The Black Arts Enterprise (2011)

• Book Notes: Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020)

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles (2026)

• Book Notes: One Black Writer at a Time (2026) (with Kenton Rambsy)

• Book Notes: The Convergence: When Collegiate Black Men Meet African American Literary Studies (2026)

Building a Dataset from Inside Black Short Stories

By Kenton Rambsy

I am building a dataset drawn from more than 200 Black short stories by annotating granular textual features, such as dialogue, geography and settings, and character demographics, to create a level of structured data on creative writing that is still rare in digital humanities and African American literary studies.

The goal is twofold. First, we are constructing one of the most sizable datasets focused specifically on Black short fiction. Second, we are generating insights into recurring narrative features so readers can identify stories based on interests in space, dialogue patterns, character types, or structural tendencies.

For more than a decade, my research tracked circulation and visibility. In “Discovering the Big 7,” from 2019, I identified 7 short story writers most frequently anthologized across decades. In “Studying 500 Black Writers in the New York Times,” from 2022, my brother Howard Rambsy II and I examined how media attention concentrates around a limited group of writers.

Those projects documented where writers appear and how often institutions return to them. This current annotation project shifts the focus from circulation to composition by examining what happens inside the stories themselves. Publication records can be organized into trends, but dialogue, spatial orientation, and character interaction must be identified through line by line reading and interpretive judgment.

By isolating these elements, structural patterns become measurable rather than intuitive. Baldwin and Ellison, across six stories each, both rely mostly on settings and projected spaces, yet Baldwin’s 301 total spatial references compared to Ellison’s 70 show a far denser layering of geography. The value of the dataset lies in making those similarities and differences visible in concrete terms rather than leaving them as generalized claims.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Sunday, February 15, 2026

Jade Harrison and the Architecture of Annotation

By Kenton Rambsy

Digital humanities projects often rely on labor that remains unseen, and the Black Short Fiction dataset depends on that labor, with Jade Harrison serving as Data Ranger Coordinator and lead research assistant for this Mellon-supported phase of the Black Lit Network, structuring the project through annotation templates, data dictionaries, database design, and quality control systems.

I first met Jade when she was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Arlington. She later returned for her MA in English, where I served as her thesis advisor, and she is now completing her PhD at the University of Kansas. There she worked closely with the History of Black Writing project and with Maryemma Graham before Graham’s retirement, strengthening Jade’s foundation in African American literary scholarship and collaborative archival research.

Jade’s contributions extend beyond coordination. She helped identify, digitize, and organize the corpus of short stories, and she created data dictionaries that define how each column in the dataset functions. She established standards for interpreting different story types, recognizing that annotating speculative fiction requires different decisions than annotating historical or realist fiction. After each story is annotated, she reviews files for consistency and accuracy, ensuring the dataset reflects literary nuance rather than flattening it.

Once datasets are cleaned, Jade produces analytical reports that quantify patterns across writers and stories, developing an expansive knowledge of Black short fiction and identifying differences in how writers structure dialogue, distribute space, and construct character relationships. Moving between annotation and analysis has strengthened her ability to connect themes, forms, and historical contexts across a wide range of authors, demonstrating how literary expertise and digital humanities methods reinforce one another. She moves between close reading, database construction, and quantitative reporting with precision, ensuring that the dataset is not only sizable but intellectually rigorous and historically grounded.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

Edward P. Jones and Geo-Tagging Black Short Fiction

By Kenton Rambsy

In the second phase of the Mellon Foundation grant supporting the Black Lit Network, we are expanding efforts to make Black-authored texts more discoverable by turning from novels and circulation patterns to short fiction, with a focus on identifying narrative features that shape Black short stories—beginning with geography through literary geo-tagging, also known as cultural geo-tagging.

My work on Black short fiction began with Edward P. Jones. His detailed rendering of Washington, DC in his short story collections Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006) led me to develop literary geo-tagging as a method for identifying and documenting the many locations embedded in his stories. I recorded more than 200 references to neighborhoods, streets, landmarks, and housing complexes, tracing how Jones plots the city and how urban change reshaped the spaces that appear in his fiction.

Cultural geo-tagging allowed me to measure the range and frequency of spatial references, revealing how Jones constructs cultural space through physical detail and regional specificity. The challenge emerged when I attempted to compare Jones to other writers. Many Black short story writers rely less on named coordinates and more on recurring interior environments such as kitchens, bedrooms, storefronts, and neighborhood corners. Tracking only mapped locations would privilege one form of spatial precision over another.

This realization pushed me to refine the dataset, since geography alone could not fully explain how space functions in short fiction, where settings gain meaning through the people who occupy them and the conversations that unfold within them. To extend the project responsibly, I expanded the model beyond geography, recognizing that literary space emerges through multiple narrative features rather than location alone. What began as literary geo-tagging centered on Jones evolved into a broader annotation structure that includes geography, dialogue, and character demographics, creating a comparative framework that makes Black short fiction more legible, analyzable, and accessible.

Related:

• The Black Short Story Project

The Black Short Story Project

By Kenton Rambsy

The Black Short Story Project documents the annotation and analysis of more than 200 Black short stories, focusing on dialogue, geography, and character structure. Through the Mellon-supported Data Rangers Literary Fellowship, we combine collaborative close reading with structured data collection to generate findings about narrative design while making visible the labor and infrastructure behind Black digital humanities research.

Entries

• Edward P. Jones and Geo-Tagging Black Short Fiction

• Jade Harrison and the Architecture of Annotation

• Building a Dataset from Inside Black Short Stories

Reporting on Black Readers and Digital Culture with Contributing Writers

This semester, I’m reporting on Black readers and digital culture with my two contributing writers, Joyce Woodard and Albert Smith, undergraduates at SIUE.

We’re conducting oral histories with students about their experiences with reading as undergraduates, and we’re summarizing some of our findings in blog entries. We’re also thinking through various ideas about reading in relation to digital culture.

One of our main goals is to build a catalog of writings and short reports about Black readers and how digital culture shapes their interests, behavior, struggles, and more. Over time, these entries will form a growing archive documenting how students describe their reading lives in the digital era.

Other outcomes of this project involve giving two undergraduates opportunities to share their work through a public medium and giving them a chance to contribute to a major project like this.

Reflecting on A Past Interview

By Albert Smith

Returning to an interview that Professor Rambsy did with me in my first semester of college had me confront just how much my thinking has changed.

When I was interviewed in 2022, I said that I wanted to study Psychology and Sociology because I’ve always had an appreciation for the world and how it works. That stood out to me because my thinking hasn’t evolved much from my original answer. Today I view my reasoning for pursuing those fields as being rooted in passion, but also as a reflection of the communication and social skills that I had developed up until that point.

When asked to describe challenges or barriers that I faced, I answered “internal motivation”. That particularly struck me because in hindsight that was one of the most motivated times of my life. Being in a new environment, I made a conscious effort to put myself out there so seeing my answer be internal motivation was surprising.

The main reason for the changes in my ideology is the professional and academic development I have experienced over the years. In college, my involvement in organizations and coursework helped my ability to articulate my goals while expanding my perspective through exposure to experienced psychologists and sociologists.

Reflecting on my academic journey throughout the years helped in understanding just how influential college was on my beliefs and had me considering how my non-academic duties and responsibilities impacted my ideologies.