The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a highly interactive digital scholarly lab for the collaborative research and study of pre-20th century Caribbean literature. The ECDA seeks to engage scholars and students in a shared, critical study of the textual, material, and cultural histories of the Caribbean by providing them innovative digital technologies and platforms for generating new and understudied knowledges of the Caribbean’s rich body of materials. Our approach to this digital archive solves major challenges facing scholars of Caribbean literature; currently no such pan-Caribbean digital or analogue archive of pre-20th century materials exists. Our site will foster a shared and informed engagement with the Caribbean and its literary, aesthetic, cultural, and political impact on the study of the pre-20th century Atlantic world.The project will not only preserve original texts, but will also reframe the literary history of the early Caribbean as one where something new is preserved—voices beyond the imperial history of the Caribbean. The ECDA is partnered with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLOC) and housed in Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks (NULab).
Audience
ECDA is intended to be a public, open-access collection, but is currently aimed at scholars and students for the purpose of teaching and learning, as well as international groups with similar academic and research interests.
Data Types
Types of data for ECDA include PDF (scans or original texts and manuscripts), JPEG and other image formats (paintings, drawings, maps, etc.), audio, and TEI. User annotations on data and forum discussions may also be represented as data in the future, most likely in a structured text format.
Project Phases
Prototype Omeka site (omekasites.northeastern.edu/ECDA) Data development, transcriptions Grant funded non-prototype interface for data Launch phase, community engagement
Project Goals
develop schema for TEI encoding (Summer 2014) production of TEI data (Fall 2014) generate body of texts to bring into the archive (next academic year) development of Hydra head (requires developer)