Prison Writer as Witness

Drawing from a largest and first fully-searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by incarcerated people writing about their experience inside US prisons and jail, the article proposes that there exists a broad, well established, but underappreciated mid-range manner of reading that stands between traditional close reading and computer-aided distant reading of first-person witness testimony. This mid-range or “cellular” reading method attends both to the singularity of each text, and ventures widely enough to grasp that each text gains credence and expository authority as one among aggregates of witness testimony; it is, moreover, in facilitating such mid-range reading that DH can provide readers with the foundation for moving from secondary witness and into acting for social change

Credence · GRASP · Prison · Witness · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Digital Humanities and Scholarship