We are living through the planetary construction of a hybrid cultural and historical record: parts
analog, parts digital. Even our books are now born-digital, usually in Microsoft Word, before
they ever make it to print; our research happens on a browser before we visit the shelves.
Completely immersed in that moment of construction and re-evaluation, my work aligns with
what Roopika Risam has recently described as a “postcolonial digital humanities,” a praxis
whose main task is to produce “the multiple epistemologies […] that are needed to ensure that
cultural heritage from communities of the Global South finds a place in the digital cultural
record.” The larger share of that scholarly work, theory and practice, has wrestled with the
implications of such a moment for the careful construction and interpretation of the documentary
record of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic. My scholarship moves then beyond signaling
absence or crisis to engage in restorative and experimental work to build and read a useful past.
In this sense, the work also belongs in the philological and historicist traditions of textual
criticism and book history from the margins.