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Chapter 12 - The History of Mary Prince and Digital Humanities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

By
Sarah Connell
Edited by
Nicole N. Aljoe
Nicole N. Aljoe
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

This chapter explores the questions and insights that the digital humanities and Mary Prince can offer each other. With its complex interplay of authorial and editorial agencies, The History of Mary Prince reveals key challenges for several major modes of digital scholarship: developing accurate but scalable digital models, aligning computational methods with humanities research questions, and curating textual collections for study and analysis. This chapter offers a case study with the Women Writers Project’s edition of The History of Mary Prince to outline both the new potentials and the thorny questions that arise in research with digital editions. Working with a digital model, scholars can examine the text at many levels and in contexts that range from other personal narratives to hundreds of works of pre-Victorian women’s writing. The case study focuses on how Prince and the other writers who contributed to The History engage with gender, with authorial and editorial agency, and with the representation of persons – but this is only the beginning of what is possible for Prince and the digital humanities.

Keywords

digital humanitiestext encodingdigital scholarly editingearly women’s writing
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince , pp. 201 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Works Cited

Aljoe, Nicole N. “Caribbean Slave Narratives: Creole in Form and Genre.” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–14.Google Scholar
Bailey, Moya Z. “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011.Google Scholar
Flanders, Julia, and Jannidis, Fotis. “A Gentle Introduction to Data Modeling.” The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-Based Resources, edited by Flanders, Julia and Jannidis, Fotis, Routledge, 2018, pp. 26–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flanders, Julia, and Jockers, Matthew L.. “A Matter of Scale.” Keynote Lecture from the Boston Area Days of Digital Humanities Conference. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, Mar. 18, 2013.Google Scholar
Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text, vol. 36, 2018, pp. 57–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Methodology for Transcription and Editing.” Women Writers Project, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, www.wwp.northeastern.edu/about/methods/editorial_principles.html.Google Scholar
Noble, Safiya. “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Gold, Matthew K. and Klein, Lauren F., University of Minnesota Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. Edited by Pringle, Thomas, London, 1831, Women Writers Online, Women Writers Project, Northeastern University, Boston, www.wwp.northeastern.edu/texts/prince.history.html.Google Scholar
Risam, Roopika. “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015.Google Scholar
Salih, Sara. “Introduction.” The History of Mary Prince, Penguin, 2004, pp. vii–xxxiv.Google Scholar

Further Reading

Bailey, Moya Z. “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011.Google Scholar
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Klein, Lauren F.. Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flanders, Julia, et al. “Text Encoding Fundamentals with TEI.” Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, edited by Crompton, Constance, Lane, Richard J., and Siemens, Ray, Routledge, 2016, pp. 104–22.Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, pp. 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text, vol. 36, 2018, pp. 57–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature, vol. 85, no. 4, 2013, pp. 661–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noble, Safiya. “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Gold, Matthew K. and Klein, Lauren F., University of Minnesota Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Prince, Alanna, et al. “Between DH and Me: Black Studies in/for the Rising Digital Humanities Generation.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 3, 2022.Google Scholar
Risam, Roopika. “Beyond the Margins: Intersectionality and the Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015.Google Scholar

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