Workshop – Decolonizing the Archive through Recovery and Remix: Scholarship and Teaching with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive-ECDA (Nicole Aljoe, Dir. of Africana Studies Program; Assoc. Prof. of English at Northeastern University)

The workshop will begin with a brief introduction to the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA)—an open-access, free, interactive scholarly database housed at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts under the auspices of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. The ECDA has two primary related, overarching goals: the first is to uncover and make accessible pre-20th century Caribbean writing; and the second is to facilitate scholarly interactions with these texts by providing tools and a forum to experiment and explore representations of the colonial cultures of the early Caribbean in the classroom, as well as in scholarly work. I’ll then focus on the “Embedded Slave Narratives” exhibit to illuminate some of the specific tools and strategies—such as accessible design, metadata, TEI-transcription, and contrapuntal readings—that we practice as we engage in archival decolonization. In addition, I’m also happy to discuss our process of uploading texts, discerning appropriate transcription methods, as well as the many ways in which we and others develop classroom assignments, which draw upon the materials in the archive.