

For information about the upcoming Enslaved Conference, to be held March 8-9, 2019, at the RCAH Theater in Snyder-Phillips Hall at Michigan State University, click here. The preliminary schedule is available here.
In recent years, a growing number of archives, databases, and collections that organize and make sense of records of enslavement have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of projects and databases presents a number of challenges:
- Disambiguating and merging individuals across multiple datasets is nearly impossible given their current, siloed nature;
- Searching, browsing, and quantitative analysis across projects is extremely difficult;
- It is often difficult to find projects and databases;
- There are no best practices for digital data creation;
- Many projects and datasets are in danger of going offline and disappearing.
In response to these challenges, Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, in partnership with the MSU Department of History and scholars at multiple institutions, has begun work on Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade, a constellation of software and services built to address these challenges. Enslaved’s primary focus is people—individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading.
Article Published on Ascension Parish Document Transcription Efforts
A new article published on February 8 in The Advocate details the efforts underway at the River Road African American Museum to make digitized documents about enslaved people in Ascension Parish in Louisiana more widely available to the public. The article, called...
read moreFreedom Narratives Symposium
The "Freedom Narratives" symposium, the fourth workshop of the Studies in the History of the African Diaspora Documents (SHADD) initiative (www.shadd.org), took place on December 7-8, 2018, at the Harriet Tubman Institute at York University in Toronto. Scholars from...
read moreVideo: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on Digital History and Slavery Databases
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is an award-winning author and Professor Emerita of Latin American and Caribbean History, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Since 2010 she has held the position of Professor of History at Michigan State University. In 2010 she helped to launch Slave...
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