The power of place that embodied what it meant to be Black during Jim Crow segregation in North America resonates a persistent narrative in African American resort community history. While some spaces are cherished and remembered, others have been forgotten. In African American resort and beachfront communities such as West Michigan Resort and Justamere Inn near Benton Harbor, Michigan, and to some extent American Beach near Jacksonville, Florida, the documentation is limited. However, in spaces such as Chicken Bone Beach in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Highland Beach near Baltimore, Maryland, Oak’s Bluff on Martha’s Vineyard, and Idlewild, Michigan, the New Negro movement of the East coast and Midwest states set the mood for progressive racial uplift, middle-class upward mobility and respectability. As part of a digital map series, this project raises questions about shifting interactions and relations of race and class, leisure and work, and northern rural and urban Midwestern African Americans of the 20th century in Idlewild a micro-ism of the larger African American population in the U. S.
By focusing on Idlewild as a means to insert Black resorts into the literature on black separate institutions, this paper raises three questions. First, what were some of the factors that led to Idlewild’s development as a popular black resort? Secondly, to what extent was the entertainment of the 1950s and 60s the economic engine that helped to shape Idlewild as a popular resort designation? Finally, in what ways were changing class structures, consumerism, and the political climate factors responsible for the decline of Idlewild informed by internal structures and external interactions with urban black and white America?
This compact course introduces participants to fundamental concepts and approaches in digital humanities. The interdisciplinary essence of the field will be debated and the various possibilities for collaboration explored. As a research methodology, corpus linguistics will be used to enunciate the analytical skills necessary for investigating the intersection of humanities and digital technologies.
This is a hands-on interactive session to engage participants on how to analyse digital texts. Contemporary concordancers and text mining tools will be presented. In particular, there will be exercises on the use of AntConc, Voyant and text processing with R customized to the research objectives of participants
Over the years, technology has tremendously transformed and facilitated research processes, from Sciences to Engineering and to the Management studies etc. With the emergence and continuous evolution of technology in the 21st century, the Humanities has equally benefitted hugely from some of these new technologies. In this presentation, we would be examining the use and application of digital tools to research in the Humanities. We would demonstrate how R Programming Language can be used vastly in the construction of corpora and automatic extraction of text from the internet. We would also demonstrate how this software (R Programming language) can be used to perform some text mining task such as word clouds creation, K-means clustering, and sentiment analysis. Finally, some visualization techniques in Digital Humanities would be examined through the use of Voyant Tools.
We organise summer schools, workshops, seminars and conferences that will provide the platform to raise and equip a new generation of scholars and researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Our activities will equally generate ideas, demonstrate the usefulness of computer methodologies to humanistic studies and disseminate research outcomes to benefit the larger society. It is hoped that the Centre will soon emerge as an intellectually stimulating international research hub that will encourage scholars and researchers to investigate the different ways in which digital technologies, web-based resources and ICT are opening new ways for research projects in languages, literature, culture, history, philosophy, creative arts and media studies, as well as in the personal and social experiences of humans in modern society. As such, CEDHUL hopes to build the capacity of graduates of humanities with additional skills to compete successfully in the global/digital job market.