I began to build the Postcolonial Studies @ Emory website with my students in 1996 in order to furnish introductory level information on important figures and significant topics in Postcolonial Studies. Over the years, a substantial archive became available, comprising nearly 200 pages on postcolonial authors, artists, theorists, terms and issues; these pages continue to get thousands of hits every day.
Available since 1996, the current version of this site (Postcolonial Studies @ Emory 3.0) combines early features of digital scholarship with its newest ones. In its original incarnation, this web site aimed to furnish information, a distinctive attribute of digital humanities 1.0. In successive revisions, the site began to incorporate facets of Web 2.0: user production of limited content, commentary, and tagging. After the addition of a page on calls for papers on topics related to Postcolonial Studies, users have enthusiastically shared information about conferences and other events on this site. Postcolonial Studies @ Emory 3.0 now aims to include crowd-sourced content for its section on “Book Reviews” and “The Digital Bookshelf.” Both sections are intended as modest attempts at the imperative to be more inclusive. Scholars from all over the world are invited to submit information about books they have published, regardless of where they were published and whether they are currently out of print. If “video killed the radio star,” and the web seems ready to kill the printed page, this is an attempt to keep scholarship alive on a digital bookshelf that may lead back to the printed book. For the section on “Book Reviews,” I particularly welcome submissions by graduate students, arguably the most voracious and critical readers in the academy today.
Readers can continue to contribute comments on pages, including corrective information, relevant new publications on the page topic, or, of course, kudos. Here you may post CFPs, and announcements about relevant publications, preferably with a brief summary. The revamped site has undergone several usability tests to make it accessible to a range of users; we apologize if we have been unable to accommodate the needs of others. If you have questions, please e-mail the faculty developer of this project, Deepika Bahri at gpsemory@gmail.com. Please note that we are not able to furnish email, snail mail, or any other contact information about the many authors, critics, and artists listed on this site. Since many requests have come in over the years for information about citing from these pages, or reproducing them for course packs, an instructions page has been developed for your convenience here.
Credits
Since 1996, Deepika Bahri has created and maintained content for Postcolonial Studies @ Emory with her students. In 2011, she won a Mellon grant from Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC) to redesign the site in collaboration with the DiSC staff. Postcolonial Studies graduate students involved in the update of this site include Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, Asha French, Joseph Fritsch, Michael Lehman, Roopika Risam, Caroline Schwenz, and Molly Slavin.