About Baquaqua

Welcome to the online collection of Baquaqua : Afro-Diasporic Text Corpus. We’ve created this online collection to increase access to writings of Afro-Diasporic authors, and to serve as a temporary online library while we complete a searchable database.

The goals of Baquaqua : Afro-Diasporic Text Corpus project are:

To create a complete, dynamic, diachronic corpus of Afro-Diasporic writings in all genres.

This project will provide access to as many writings by Diasporic authors as we can find in all genres and in all times, within the limits of copyright or other licensing. We will continually add to the database as the public domain threshold advances or as licensing agreements permit.

To annotate texts with Part-of-Speech and other descriptive tags to facilitate text analysis and corpus linguistics,

This project will provide access to texts in both annotated and unannotated formats to meets diverse needs of researchers in many scholarly environments.

To create a searchable database with interactive analytic tools and export options,

The aforementioned features (i.e. tags and field values) of this project will be discoverable through a database with different search parameters for retrieving by annotation type, genre, author and numerous other metadata values. Export options will allow researchers to generate sub-corpora specific to their needs, or produce result reports of analyses that utilize built-in tools.

To serve as a venue for future computational linguistics, and digital humanities research.

The corpus and its infrastructure can be used to study Computational Linguistics and broader aspects of Digital Humanities comparatively or in the abstract. We can use this and related research to make informed decisions about incorporating new features to make the resource more responsive to developments in these fields.

To serve as a bibliographic resource for diasporic authors.

As a compendium of African Diasporic writers, this project can also serve as a bibliographic resource that provides users with authors and writings by genre, time period, location and more, as well as a library that provides human-readable texts.

At present we are developing several test corpora to evaluate the technical challenges for approaching the foregoing goals.