Anthology, Archive, Corpus: the Design and Implications of African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology

• Amardeep Singh

This essay considers how a digital collection of African American poetry from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might transform our understanding of the shape of African American literary history. The vehicle is a digital project called African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology, which aims to serve as both a comprehensive textual corpus and a tagged and annotated collection – a project that combines elements of the anthology, the archive, and the corpus. The goal of the project as a whole is to bring together well-known and widely anthologised figures like Claude McKay, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen, alongside a large body of poets whose names and writings have today fallen off the critical radar. The present essay will describe the methods and goals of the project in some detail, beginning with historically-informed definitional accounts of each of the three keywords in our title: the “Anthology,” “Archive,” and “Corpus.” Since the meaning of each term is, we find, rather fluid in the digital context, a functionalist approach is adopted. African American Poetry: a Digital Anthology, we argue, can be seen as using the affordances of the Scalar digital platform to perform all three functions.