Africana Studies Priorities in Technology and Research: Change, Reinvention, and Google Books Ngram

This introduction to the Special Issue on Africana Digital Technologies offers a popular culture technology survey of the 1980s to the present to capture the average humanistic social scientist’s view of technology. Relying on a methodology that layers autoethnographical data with an applied case study of the subfield of comparative Black literature, this study isolates how Google Books Ngram is a useful technology for revisionist research. Its ongoing digitization of previously uncatalogued, unsearchable, and/or unavailable scholarship is a newer resource for research and revision that permits us to generate more accurate intellectual genealogies. This introductory essay chronicles key technology concerns on the culture’s social radar over the past nearly fifty years, culminating with our contemporary understanding of Africana frameworks of artificial intelligence (AI) and groundbreaking technologies in the digital humanities. This essay acknowledges the new technological landscapes that challenge us to expand our skillset and critical worldview through new curiosities, ambitions, and competencies that will mold Africana Studies into an even more comprehensive discipline. The goal is to ensure that Africana Studies’ sometimes overlooked subject area of science and technology becomes a foundational and integrated part of the discipline’s 21st century’s curriculum, maintained by stable Africana faculty lines in this area and by routinely merging technological practices with the field’s standard, core content.