This book brings Afrofuturism into conversation with digital humanities to pioneer the field of Digital Africana Studies, and shows how students and academics can engage with the vision of Afrofuturism, both theoretically and practically, in the classroom and through research. As Black people across the globe consider their place in the future following the past two decades of technological advancement, Afrofuturism and its relevance for the humanities has become ever pertinent. While Afrofuturism has thus far been discussed through a literary, artistic, or popular culture lens, growing use of new technologies, and its resultant intersections with the reality of our racial experiences, has created a need for approaching Afrofuturism from a digital studies perspective. Via detailed case studies, Bryan W. Carter introduces the field of Digital Africana Studies to demonstrate how this new area can be experienced pedagogically. Alongside the book, readers can also visit select Digital Africana Studies projects that exemplify the various technologies and projects described at the author’s website: ibryancarter.com/projects. Given its unique approach to the path-breaking tradition of Afrofuturism, the book will be indispensable for scholars and students across fields such as digital humanities, media studies, black studies, African American studies, and Africana studies.

The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design is a 21st century statement on the intersection of the future of African people with art, culture, technology, and politics. This collection enters the global debate on the emerging field of Afrofuturism studies with an international array of scholars and artists contributing to the discussion of Black futurity in the 21st century. The contributors analyze and respond to the invisibility or mischaracterization of Black people in the popular imagination, in science fiction, and in philosophies of history.

This volume offers a critical overview of digital reading practices and scholarly efforts to analyze and understand reading in the mediatized landscape. Building on research about digital reading, born-digital literature, and digital audiobooks, The Digital Reading Condition explores reading as part of a broader cultural shift encompassing many forms of media and genres. Bringing together research from media and literary studies, digital humanities, scholarship on reading and learning, as well as sensory studies and research on multimodal and multisensory media reception, the authors address and challenge print-biased conceptions of reading that are still prevalent in research, whether the reading medium is print or digital. They argue that the act of reading itself is changing, and rather than rejecting digital media as unsuitable for sustained or focused reading practices, they argue that the complex media landscape challenges us to rethink how to define reading as a mediated practice. Presenting a truly interdisciplinary perspective on digital reading practices, this volume will appeal to scholars and graduate students in communication, media studies, new media and technology, literature, digital humanities, literacy studies, composition, and rhetoric.

Big Digital Humanities has its origins in a series of seminal articles Patrik Svensson published in the Digital Humanities Quarterly between 2009 and 2012. As these articles were coming out, enthusiasm around Digital Humanities was acquiring a great deal of momentum and significant disagreement about what did or didn’t “count” as Digital Humanities work. Svensson’s articles provided a widely sought after omnibus of Digital Humanities history, practice, and theory. They were informative and knowledgeable and tended to foreground reportage and explanation rather than utopianism or territorial contentiousness. In revising his original work for book publication, Svensson has responded to both subsequent feedback and new developments. Svensson’s own unique perspective and special stake in the Digital Humanities conversation comes from his role as director of the HUMlab at Umeå University. HUMlab is a unique collaborative space and Digital Humanities center, which officially opened its doors in 2000. According to its own official description, the HUMlab is an open, creative studio environment where “students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and international guests come together to engage in dialogue, experiment with technology, take on challenges and move scholarship forward.” It is this last element “moving scholarship forward” that Svensson argues is the real opportunity in what he terms the “big digital humanities,” or digital humanities as practiced in collaborative spaces like the HUMlab, and he is uniquely positioned to take an account of this evolving dimension of Digital Humanities practice.

The ideas and practices related to afrofuturism have existed for most of the 20th century, especially in the north American African diaspora community. After Mark Dery coined the word "afrofuturism" in 1993, Alondra Nelson as a member of an online forum, along with other participants, began to explore the initial terrain and intellectual underpinnings of the concept noting that “AfroFuturism has emerged as a term of convenience to describe analysis, criticism and cultural production that addresses the intersections between race and technology.” Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astroblackness represents a transition from previous ideas related to afrofuturism that were formed in the late 20th century around issues of the digital divide, music and literature. Afrofuturism 2.0 expands and broadens the discussion around the concept to include religion, architecture, communications, visual art, philosophy and reflects its current growth as an emerging global Pan African creative phenomenon.

Based on the auto-ethnographic work of a team of scholars who developed the first Black Digital Humanities program at a research institution, this book details how to centralize Black feminist praxes of care, ethics, and Black studies in the digital humanities (DH). In this important and timely collection, the authors Catherine Knight Steele, Jessica H. Lu, and Kevin C. Winstead—of the first team of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative—center Black scholars, Black thought, and Black studies in creating digital research and programming. Providing insight into acquiring funding, building and maintaining community, developing curricula, and establishing a national network in the field, this book moves Black persons and Black thought from the margins to the center with a set of best practices and guiding questions for scholars, students, and practitioners developing programming, creating work agreements, building radically intentional pedagogy and establishing an ethical future for Black DH. This is essential reading for researchers, students, scholars, and practitioners working in the fields of DH and Black studies, as well as graduate students, faculty, and administrators working in humanities disciplines who are interested in forming centers, courses, and/or research programs in Black digital studies.

Although media studies and digital humanities are established fields, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving readers a critical guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersections of media, culture, and practice. Topics include: access, praxis, social justice, design, interaction, interfaces, mediation, materiality, remediation, data, memory, making, programming, and hacking.