ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the iterative nature of the authors' work, which relies on digital methods, and demonstrates how art-historical research in the digital realm prompts scholars to grapple with and write about their processes in generative ways. Mapping Senufo will highlight different stories and perspectives, each one linked to particular objects, images, people, places, or events, rather than insisting on a single, all-encompassing narrative. One goal of Mapping Senufo is to create a publication that illustrates rather than merely tells readers how the term Senufo and the corpus of art it names are intimately connected to, instead of separate from, the colonial and postcolonial contexts in which Senufo identities and arts have flourished. The term Senufo and other cultural or ethnic group labels offered early twentieth-century admirers of African arts ready categories for objects then entering European and North American collections.
