About this Event
With Erik Fredner (Oregon State University) and Arthur Knight (William & Mary), I created a database that describes every author and work selected for twenty-six comprehensive anthologies of African American literature from 1929 to 2025. In this talk I’ll go over some of the nuts and bolts of building the database and collaborating across institutions. Then I’ll cover a few of our findings: We argue that recurring author and work selections across different anthologies represent what Henry Louis Gates Jr. termed the “implicit canon” of African American literature. We also show that this implicit canon is mostly a list of authors, rather than works.
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J.D. Porter received his PhD in English from Stanford University in 2017 and then worked as the Associate/Technical Director at the Stanford Literary Lab. He specializes in text mining, American modernism, and race and ethnicity theory, with occasional forays into jazz studies, network analysis, and ordinary language philosophy. His work has appeared in (or is slated to appear in) Episteme, Cultural Analytics, the pamphlet series of the Stanford Literary Lab, and the edited volumes Ralph Ellison in Context and The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story.
Event venue & nearby stays
Williams Hall 623, Humanities Conference Room, 255 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, United States
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