Since my last posting (March 30) I have,
Researched more context to PWP’s verbal rebuses, particularly in the British West Indies.
The intersection of rebus poems and enslavement announcements in colonial newspapers suggests the complex nexus of publication in which PWP’s printed rebuses might have been read, including the use of initials to create an open secret disclosing puzzle makers and at the same time to serve as an identifying mark for “absented” or “lost” self-emancipated men and women.
Had a fruitful and spirited discussion with Micki about possible digital tools that might expand the D side of this aspect of our DH rebus project;
Returned and been guided to readings on Black Digital Humanities (Jessica Marie Johnson’s “Marked Bodies,” Kim Gallon’s “Making the Case for Black Digital Humanities,” Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life” Saidya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”) while participating in a seminar on Pre Modern Race and DH at the annual SAA conference;
Begun to compare what can be known about PWP from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data Base to that in other knowledge corpuses or archives.
Subsequently, sworn off more research on PWP and verbal rebuses for now, turning to finding what information I can for an essay on the material and publication history of visual rebuses in the period and languages on which we are focusing.
Lastly, started looking through the holdings of regional rare book collections that are reopening, to see if it might be worth going in person to examine undigitized rebuses from the 18th & 19th centuries (specifically Yale, Columbia, Morgan Library, NYPL), Princeton) and at the same time collecting digitized rebuses to add to our archive.
