#vizoftheweek 11: Amiri Baraka, Poetry and Anthology Data

This week, read a guest post by Dr. Howard Rambsy II (Twitter: @blackstudies). Dr. Rambsy is a professor of literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He blogs at African American literature at culturalfront.org.

Baraka is one of our most prolific and critically writers, and there is an enormous body of information about him. The production of a dataset on aspects of his work makes it possible to manage the vast materials relating to his publishing career. 

On the one hand, scholars have produced extensive studies on African American literature. On the other hand, humanities scholars have pursued projects related to technology also known as digital humanities. A combination of approaches – African American literary studies and digital humanities – yield fascinating and useful results. Accordingly, the production of a dataset on Baraka offers one possibility for understanding the importance of merging literary history, digital tools, and quantitative analysis.  

This dataset on Amiri Baraka includes 136 of his unique poems, which appeared in 120 anthologies published between 1960 through 2018. The dataset reveals that twenty of Baraka’s poems appear in six or more anthologies, and ten of those poems appear in ten or more anthologies.  Baraka’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” “An Agony. As Now,” “A Poem for Black Hearts,” and “In Memory of Radio” are his most frequently selected poems, each appearing in more than twenty collections.

Editors anthologized a majority (63%) of Baraka’s poems that were first composed prior to the 1980s. His five most anthologized poems – “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” “An Agony. As Now,” “A Poem for Black Hearts,” “In Memory of Radio,” and “Black Art” – were all produced before 1970.  During the 1960s, Baraka’s poems appeared in fourteen anthologies, and his poems appeared in thirty-three anthologies during the 1970s. His poems appeared in nine anthologies during the 1980s, twenty-nine during the 1990s, twenty-three during the 2000s, and eleven during the 2010s.

The dataset offers a consideration of the frequency of Baraka’s appearances throughout his career.

My dataset, research, and writing on Baraka would have likely only appeared in the form of a conventional article. However, I was aware that my younger brother, Kenton, a literature professor at The University of Texas at Arlington, was collaborating with his university’s Director for Research Data Services Peace Ossom Williamson on data visualization projects. I had witnessed some of their previous projects so I was pleased with the opportunity to place my work on Baraka in the context of their projects.

A Tableau Public page based on Baraka poetry data makes it possible to view and interact with his publishing history in original, beneficial ways. The page offers overarching views of his appearances in anthologies. The visual shows clusters and varied sizing to connote significance. The page also allows for hovering and clicking to highlight varied aspects of the information.

This data visualization represents a new direction in the expansive scholarship on Baraka. This might be one of the first presentations of his work using this kind of technology. Hopefully, it will serve as a basis for future projects on Baraka and other black writers.

• View the online tutorials from the Data Analysis & Visualization series
• Interact with information about DFW specifically and Texas more broadly by viewing the COVID-19 Dashboard
• Read about another digital humanities dataset: the Big 7 Project
• Contact the data team at dataCAVE@uta.edu to sign up for the email updates, to ask questions, or to begin collaborating