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.
Partner Profile: Legacies of British Slave Ownership
Enslaved is excited to be working with Legacies of British Slave-ownership at University College London. Legacies researches individuals in Britain and former British colonies who owned or were otherwise associated with the ownership of the enslaved in the...
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Daryle Williams: Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade
One of the project partners on Enslaved, Dr. Daryle Williams from the University of Maryland, recently published an article, "Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade", in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Here's a...
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Partner Profile: Biographies of the Enslaved
The Hutchins Center at Harvard has partnered with Enslaved to make its forthcoming Biographies of the Enslaved database available to the public. Biographies of the Enslaved is based on three edited volumes: African American National Biography (AANB);...
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