A page of Fats About the Negro, written by J. A. Rogers and Illustrated by A. S. Millai. There's an image of a statue, an old-timey radio, and a dark-skined aristocrat speaking to a Native American. The text is blurry but written in a comic-sans style font.
A dilapidated scrapbook. There are newspaper clippings sticking out from the edge of the landsscape-oriented book. There are also pieces of black paper paper falling off the cover.

Decoding Diaspora: Mapping J. A. Rogers’ Mythic Africa employs digital tools to consider the conception of “Africa” in the work of Joel Augustus Rogers, an early 20th century progenitor of Africana Studies. The project examines roughly 300 clippings from Rogers’ newspaper serial, Facts About the Negro, a “Ripley’s Believe or Not” style menagerie of Black peoples’ presence in world history. The pieces were curated by project director Richard Newton’s late uncle, John Rice, and grandmother, Lucille Rice. Newton’s team subsequently digitized the dilapidating collection in order to create an accessible data set for the study of Africa, modern myth, diaspora, and more.

Two students are working at ocmptuer terminals scanning documents.
Logo of the College of Arts and Sciences at the Unviersity of Alabama, established 1831. There's a crest with gothic arched windows in the middle.


With the assistance of an 2020 ASPIRE grant from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama, Dr. Richard Newton began the presevation phase of the project during the COVID-19 pandemic. With limited access to campus archives and lab space, the researcher team photographed each clipping using mobile devices and transcribed the writing into a machine-legible text corpus.

Two students are working on terminals of scanned newspaper clippings. They are smiling into the camera.
Two students are working on a podcast next to a microphone, laptop, and recording equipment.

In 2021-2022, Newton led a reseach team of undergraduate and graduate students in developing metadata and OCR scans of the newspaper clippings in the REL Digital Lab using the Optic Book A300i. The team also began creating the project’s exhibition structure on the platform, Scalar.

An image of a txt file.
An image of a spreadsheet containing metadata.
An image of Voyant Tools doing discourse analysis.
A timeline with a newspaper clipping of an ancient Egyptian ruler selected (1500BCE). It's marked Fn-23A.

In 2022-2023, the researcher team developed the Scalar Book and established project managment protocols across Box, GitHub, Microsoft Enterprise Software. The team also began cleaning the data and experimenting with Google Maps, Timeline JS, and Voyant Tools for purposes of data visualization. We also began the creation of a micro-podcast to sonically represent the newspaper text and illustrations.

"College Academy of Scholarship and Creative Acvity: CARSCA" is written against a blue sky and an image of Clark Hall.
Two students are assembling a 3d printer.

Data visualizations and interpretations ramped up in 2023-2024. Dr. Newton won a 2023 CARSCA grant from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama. The award funded the purchase of an assembled Prusa MK4 3D printer and a kit of the same model that student research team assembled. The research team began printing replicas of artificats illustrated in the newspaper clippings, using them for data exhibition and analysis. Researchers presented their work at the University of Alabama’s Undergradate Research and Creative Arts Conference, the UA REL Research Symposium, and Georgia State College and University’s Honors Day. Dr. Newton also presented an exhibit of the research to Scouting America Troop 90 to assist them in earning the Citizenship in the Society merit badge.

Dr. Newton is teaching a circle of students who are looking at a scrapbook.