Mapping Senufo: Rethinking the Art-Historical Monograph in the Era of Digital Publication

What might research and the publication of results look like if scholars producing them integrated decades of theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production into their work on so-called historical or traditional arts of Africa? Mapping Senufo—an in-progress, collaborative, born-digital publication project—offers a model for joining such theories with research and publication practice. It focuses on arts identified as Senufo, one of the most celebrated styles of African art since the early twentieth century. The project reflects our commitment to taking seriously the long-established understanding that a marker of identity, like the labeling of an art style or knowledge itself, is historically constituted, fluid, and positional. In its final form, the open-access, multimodal publication the Mapping Senufo team will produce will exemplify the contingent nature of identities, art style labeling, and knowledge production. It will also harness the interactivity of digital environments to render readers active participants in knowledge construction. In this presentation, we will examine how our initial efforts to map geographic locations linked to objects labeled as Senufo led us and the rest of the project team to reframe research questions, reevaluate sources, and reimagine the form of a digital monograph. We will also demonstrate how our use of digital technologies and our collaborative mode of working have generated fresh insights into Senufo arts, art-historical research, and digital publication.