Since the study/teaching of black literature is very often dictated by what is current or what authors will attract students to a course, most of what we know about black fiction is based on a very small sample of texts.  Our objective is to learn what this larger body of mostly non-canonical texts can tell us that we don’t know and how this knowledge alters current conceptions about black literature. Text analysis has been slow to come to black writing, but is growing. What we hope to achieve through this project is to provide the context for not only thinking about but also documenting continuity and change, tradition and innovation within African American fiction, by indexing novels according to selected features, such as word choice, geographic location, character names, narrative mode, for example. 

Black Literature and DigitalHumanities: The Black Book Interactive Project