Black Solidarity Network
The Black Solidarity Network project is an initiative that was born from what, back in 2011, I called The Network of African and African-Descendant Artistic Representation. That initial project emerged from the close reading of bibliographic information that we extracted from some of the most relevant sources representing and discussing the Black experience in Latin America. Most of the texts were literary and cultural histories, criticism, as well as works of fiction. In collaboration with The CulturePlex I tried to identify how texts, authors, and institutions were connected and created a dynamic to disseminate ideas, images and representations that could be seen as fundamental for Black communities in the region. The methodology allowed us to make some analyses in order to identify central figures, institutions, and sources in the Artistic representation of Afro-Latin American, Afro-Latin@ and Afro-Caribbean people; one of the analysis can be found at Modeling Afro-Latin American Artistic Representations in Topic Maps article published in 2013.
Base on that experience, I started to think the initial network as a possibility for collaboration with other interested researchers, practitioners, and community members. However, in order to do that, I needed to make the network available so anyone could contribute. This is when I decided to work with NodeJ and, in collaboration with Life Spring Interactive created the platform the can visit via the link anchored to the above image. The idea of this database is to start collaborating with diverse community member who may have information and be interested in identifying hidden connections.