Language: English
What is this session about?
The AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE project catalogs digital platforms created by African and Afrodescendant communities across Romance-speaking Europe. Initial data collection used spreadsheets, but fundamental research questions proved impossible to answer. We could not systematically identify authors working across multiple countries, track thematic co-occurrence patterns, or analyze platform collaboration networks. The structure could not support the queries.
This presentation demonstrates why the transformation from spreadsheet to relational database was methodological necessity, not technical preference. We show how database schema design forces theoretical clarity: every table represents a claim about what matters, every relationship encodes how entities connect, every controlled vocabulary reflects epistemological choices. The structure is argument.
Using concrete examples from the catalog, we demonstrate two analyses impossible in spreadsheets: thematic co-occurrence, revealing how communities conceptually link issues like Afrofeminism and Antiracism, and collaboration networks showing transnational connections across Romance-speaking regions. We conclude by positioning this approach within digital humanities methodology and suggesting applications to other research domains tracking complex cultural networks.
The live catalog interface will be demonstrated.
Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Julia Borst is the principal investigator of the ERC starting grant Project “Afroeurope and Cyberspace” (101110473) and APL professor at U Bremen. Within the ERC project, she focuses on the entanglements of online and offline writing and activism exploring intertextual networks that transcend the digital.
Liam Hurwitz is a computer science researcher working as external contractor on the AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE project at Universität Bremen. He develops database infrastructure for digital humanities research, focusing on structured catalogs that enable systematic analysis of cultural networks. He previously worked on computational methods for diaspora studies.
Further Info:
Overview: Digital Humanities Lunchtalks
