How Digital Humanities is Liberating the Full Story of Spelman's Legendary Organist

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"Continuo: The Sustained Life Work of Dr. Joyce Johnson" is supported by Spelman's Vision Casting Pilot Project Initiative

Michelle Hite Echoes and Algorithms Episode 1 Michelle Hite, Ph.D., is using AI to recover what gets lost when we freeze Black women in history's most famous moments. She explained recently on Spelman's "Echoes and Algorithims" Podcast hosted by Mark Lee, Ph.D., provost and senior vice president of academic affairs that when Joyce Johnson, DMD, Spelman's legendary organist sat down for an interview years ago, the journalist thought they knew where the conversation was headed. They asked Johnson to name five moments that defined her vocation. She listed them — five things the interviewer didn't expect.

Then came the follow-up: Surely playing at Martin Luther King Jr.'s memorial service contributed to your sense of vocation?

Johnson's response was swift: "In a word, no."

Hite, Spelman's director of the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program and associate professor of literature, media and writing, hasn't forgotten that moment. Now she's building a digital humanities project to ensure no one else does either.

The Problem with Icons

"What happens is that I sort of realized that in becoming an icon, what happened for me with Dr. Johnson is what happens generally with art, with icons — they get frozen in sort of the story that we tell about them," Hite explains on the new podcast "Echoes and Algorithms."

"What happens is they stop being who they could be in their fullness."

For more than 70 years, Johnson served as Spelman's organist. Seventy years of teaching, mentoring, composing, performing — and we reduced it to one April afternoon in 1968.

Hite's project, titled "Continuo: The Sustained Life Work of Dr. Joyce Johnson," takes its name from a musical term for the continuous foundation that sustains a composition. It's a fitting metaphor for what she's attempting: excavating the sustained life beneath the single celebrated moment.

Digital Tools, Liberatory Goals

With $10,000 from Spelman's Vision Casting Initiative and in collaboration with archivist Holly Smith, Hite is leading students through Johnson's papers housed in Spelman's archives. They're using digital humanities tools to comb through decades of correspondence, programs, compositions, and reflections.

But this isn't digital humanities as usual. Hite is drawing on Black digital humanities methodology, which begins with a different premise.

"Black digital humanists sort of begin with slavery as an archive, and they do such important work in thinking about the ways in which the engagement with data reinscribes the original scenario of thingifying black bodies," Hite explained.

The danger is real: Digital tools can objectify, quantify, reduce—the same violence enacted through census records and slave ledgers.

"So a part of what the project of Black digital humanists is, is to sort of reveal the ways in which that inscription is occurring, to reclaim a different sort of way of working with that data, to tell a different kind of story."

Training for Liberation

Hite already proved she could guide students through complex storytelling with difficult subjects. Under her direction, Spelman students produced "Emmett Till: The Cultural Afterlife of an American Boy" through the Spotify NextGen Audio program—a podcast that tackled one of American history's most painful narratives entirely through student voices.

The Joyce Johnson project continues that work, but adds a new dimension: teaching students how to make AI and digital tools work for Black women's stories rather than against them.

"I'm really interested in the way that we have historically innovated for the sake of our own liberation, and what it sort of means to draw on our training to drive AI," Hite says. "Like, what are we going to do in this moment to push and prod the tool for those same ends?"

What Gets Recovered

The project will result in processed archival materials, digital exhibits, and a public roundtable. But Hite's real goal is more ambitious: she wants to change what we think we know.

"In five years, hopefully what they say is, 'What else don't I know?'" Hite reflects. "I think the biggest tribute that we can pay to an investment in anti-blackness is to wonder about the lives of Black people openly."

It's about getting over what she calls "the mountain of King"—not diminishing that historic moment, but refusing to let it block the view of everything else.

Students working on the project gain hands-on experience in archival research and digital storytelling while building professional portfolios. The wider student body will benefit from the exhibits and public discussions that model how Black women's archives can be activated "on their own terms."

Listen to Hite on the Echoes and Algorithims Podcast, Episode 1

A Model for More

The project draws inspiration from Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall's vision of recovering Black women's stories from Spelman's archives. Johnson is potentially the first of many.

"It makes me think about how this could be a model for Spelman, being a place to describe and articulate how to tell Black women's stories," the podcast host observes.

Hite doesn't disagree. Spelman's archives are full of women whose lives have been reduced, forgotten, or never fully told. The digital tools that could be used to further that erasure can also be used to fight it—if wielded by people trained to ask different questions.

"She was very aware and in command of her story," Hite says of Johnson. "She knew what she meant."

The project's challenge is to let Johnson tell that story — all of it. Not just through the music, though that matters. Through her teaching philosophy, her relationships, her understanding of vocation, her life choices that had nothing to do with Memphis in 1968.

Beyond Tribute to Testimony

"Continuo" reframes Johnson's legacy "not as tribute to one public moment, but as testimony to a sustained life of artistry and service," according to Hite's vision report.

It's the difference between monument and memory, between icon and person, between what we think we know and what we might discover if we actually looked.

Hite is betting that the tools of the 21st century — wielded by Black women trained at an HBCU that centers their intellectual work — can recover what 20th-century narratives flattened.

"That relationship to storytelling, I think, is important," she reflects. "What I think we do in the AUC specifically, but at historically Black colleges in particular, is that we tell stories with data for the sake of Black life."

For the sake of Black life — not for extraction, not for objectification, not for reduction. For the sake of fullness.

"Continuo: The Sustained Life Work of Dr. Joyce Johnson" is supported by Spelman College's Vision Casting Pilot Project Initiative and aligns with the Centers of Excellence in Extending Spelman Voice and Advancing Inquiry, Critical Thinking & AI Proficiency.