Paul Robeson’s place in YouTube: A social spatial network analysis of digital heritage ............................................................................................................................................................ Mark Alan Rhodes II Kent State University, USA ....................................................................................................................................... Abstract This article utilizes the African American Paul Robeson and his representation on YouTube to address three critical and underexplored arenas in heritage studies. First, Paul Robeson is an individual all but lost in the public memory of the USA, despite having been one of the USA’s most well-known celebrities. This article presents, for the first time, a global analysis of his representation and presence through the medium of YouTube. Second, in only a limited number of studies has YouTube been utilized to analyze memorialization and heritage; this article solidifies, channels, and expands upon those techniques. Finally, this article pre- sents a spatial component to the otherwise nonspatial technique of analyzing YouTube social networks, presenting specific spatial data, which can be mapped and analyzed. Utilizing values of connectedness among videos of differ- ent topical clusters, as well as audience reactions to videos of a specific topic or place, allows for a deeper and broader understanding of both how Paul Robeson is memorialized and represented globally and how YouTube is an essential tool in social spatial heritage studies. ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 A Global Athlete, Activist, Actor, Singer, and Scholar Born in 1898 in New Jersey, by the mid-twentieth century Paul Robeson was possibly the most recog- nized figure in the world. Even without such a super- lative label, he, nonetheless, was influential enough to not only be in the College Football Hall of Fame, have a Hollywood Star, posthumous Grammy, and numer- ous honorary degrees, but continue to hold the record for longest running Shakespearean play on Broadway, be a founding member of the ‘We Charge Genocide’ campaign, and be memorialized and commemorated across the globe. From exhib- itions in Wales, plays in England, and buildings, street signs, and statues in the USA, Paul Robeson represents a cornerstone in not only African American and US history but Pan-Africanist thought and global rights movements. This continued memory is in spite of, though not free from influence, his being blacklisted and re- stricted from travel during the red-baiting of the McCarthy era before his death in 1976. Particularly following the centenary of his birth, there has been somewhat of a renaissance of schol- arly work on Paul Robeson. Many researchers have begun to compare and contrast Robeson with his peers and contemporaries, such as Beyonce ´ (Gammage, 2017), W.E.B. DuBois (Carew, 2004; Balaji, 2007), Isadora Duncan, Charlie Chaplin (Chambers, 2006), Jackie Robinson (Dorinson, 1999, 2002), actor and writer Tayo Aluko (Rhodes, 2016b), O.J. Simpson (Guerrero, 1998), and British politician Aneurin Bevan (Williams, 2015), while Correspondence: Mark Rhodes, 325 S. Lincoln St., 413 McGilvrey Hall, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44240, USA. E-mail: mrhode21@kent.edu Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2019. ß The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 174 doi:10.1093/llc/fqy027 Advance Access published on 27 July 2018 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/34/1/174/5060702 by Kent State University Libraries user on 15 March 2019