Kim T. Gallon

The history of black newspapers in the United States is at the core of the African American experience. Yet print and digital scholarship on the black press is relatively limited and falls far short of the work on other topics in the field of African American history. The Black Press Born-Digital (BPBD) project is a step in rectifying this issue. It transcends traditional digital newspaper programs by utilizing EPUB 3.0 open source software and the Open Monograph Press platform to create a series of four peer-reviewed born-digital books on transnationalism, the short story tradition, children’s columns and political cartoons from nineteenth and twentieth century black newspapers. The BPBD project recovers the history of African American journalism and demonstrates that digital humanistic work does not circumvent traditional modes of scholarship but strengthens it and stands on its own as scholarly work.