Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers

Research Exploration

When I was doing my dissertation research, which led to The Nicest Kids in Town, I was fascinated by the tremendous variety of news published in the Philadelphia Tribune. As I searched for articles related to civil rights, music, television, and education, I also came across stories about high school sports, police brutality, and beauty pageants; advertisements for Pepsi and living room furniture; and sensationalized crime stories.  By the time I was doing research for my second book, Why Busing Failed, the Philadelphia Tribune and several other blacks newspapers were digitized. While this allowed me to find and analyze over 10,000 newspaper articles on school desegregation, I missed the experience of working with microfilm reels and unexpectedly stumbling across interesting stories. I appreciate that digitization makes it possible to search millions of articles with high levels of precision, but with Black Quotidian I wanted to reintroduce the elements of exploration, randomness, and surprise that I associate with my first encounters with black newspapers.

As more historical sources are digitized and made available via databases and the web, it is increasingly important for researchers and teachers to reflect on what different search methods can obscure and reveal. As Vincent Brown argues, “when we shift our emphasis from historical recovery to rigorous and responsible creativity, we recognize that archives are not just the records bequeathed to us by the past; archives also consist of the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to read its signs, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.”15  Searching for the keyword “civil rights” in the ProQuest Historical Black Newspaper database, for example, returns over 240,000 results from the 1890s to the 2000s. These results pose several questions: Where does one begin? Why are some articles ranked above others, and how does the algorithm determine relevance? What possible connections exist among these results? For my students, they find the quantity of results overwhelming, and most end up focusing only on the first page of search results.



The next section considers how the Scalar web-authoring platform complements this model of research exploration.

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