This article reimagines the quantified self within the context of Black feminist technologies. Bringing computation and autoethnographic methods together using a methodology I call computational digital autoethnography, I harvest my social media data to create a corpus for analysis. I apply topic modeling to these data to uncover themes that are connected with broader societal issues affecting African American women. Applying a computational autoethnographic approach to a researcher’s own digitized data allows for yet another dimension of mixed-methods research. This radical intervention has the potential to transform the social sciences by bringing together two seemingly divergent methodological approaches in service to Black feminist ways of knowing.

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Computational analysis and digital humanities are far from neutral processes and sites unimpeded by the political, social and economic context in which they emerged and are utilized. As an interdisciplinary field, the digital humanities have transformed the relationship of humans to computers broadly conceived. At the same time, the methods, theories, perspectives and the concomitant digital tools developed are being criticized for reproducing the social divisions that exist in society. The effort to recover Black women's subjectivities from the digital minefield is not without its challenges, reflected in our study which searched approximately 800,000 books, newspapers, and articles in the HathiTrust and JSTOR Digital Libraries. The goal was to identify perceptions and lived experiences of Black women that emerged and the resulting knowledge that developed. The project team discovered multiple challenges related to the rescue and recovery of Black women's standpoints or group knowledge. This essay explores how even as computational analysis has embedded biases, it can be utilized to recover the experiences of Black women from within the digitized record. Thus, computational analysis and all that it encompasses not only makes visible Black women's experiences, but also expands the scope of the digital humanities.

Little attention has been given to the unique social-historical context driving the political consumerism, meaning making, and experiences of African Americans. Even less attention has been given to the long tradition of African American political consumerism in the USA. Reevaluating the Universal Negro Improvement Association's Black Star Line as one of the largest and most audacious displays of massive black American transnational political consumerism, this article investigates how a more inclusive construction of blackness impacted the ways in which African Americans accessed political activism, specifically racialized political consumerism (RPC). This article engages political consumption theory as well as pan-Africanist frameworks to explain what shaped such political mobilization and to explore the unique ways in which political consumerism was employed. It concludes that race was used explicitly to mobilize people around political consumerism and that conceptualizations of race shaped how consumerism was executed, arguing that while RPC was effective in mobilizing groups, it was unsuccessful in leading to sustained improvement in the conditions of African Americans.

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