The data in this project focused on the historical enslavement of Africans, which includes enslaved Africans; their enslaved descendants; former slaves; individuals involved in the sale, employment, control, and/or manumission of enslaved people (slavers, financiers, merchants, ships’ captains and crew, land/factory/ship owners, etc.); and others who were enslaved with and/or labored in the same societies as enslaved Africans and their descendants (for example, enslaved indigenous people and indentured people). Our content focuses on slavery from Africa across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, from the origins of transoceanic slavery through the emancipation generation. Other types of global slavery are outside of our specific scope.
For guidance on submitting datasets, see the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation’s “Submission and Style Guide.” Please note that we can only take data that has been extracted from primary sources, by which we mean spreadsheets of information, rather than text or scans of documents. The “Methodology” section in published JSDP articles is a great resource to learn how other contributors created their datasets.
We can’t help with the labor to create datasets out of your documents, but we are happy to provide advice. We can also provide a letter of support if you are applying for grant funding from your state humanities council or other sources to create datasets that are relevant to Enslaved.org.
Enslaved.org is constantly expanding, but only individuals who appear in submitted datasets will show up in search results. Many famous individuals or your ancestors might be missing because they haven’t been part of any contributed dataset yet. Descriptions of the datasets we have integrated so far can be found here https://enslaved.org/data. We’re hoping to double our records in the coming months and working with larger genealogical data providers to include even more content. If you know of a dataset in which an enslaved person of interest appears, let us know and we will try to integrate it into our resources.
To see our announcements about new content, you can follow Matrix (the research center that houses Enslaved.org) on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.
Enslaved.org is part of Michigan State University's Matrix: Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, which is 501c3. To donate to the project, visit https://enslaved.org/support-our-mission.
For other questions, write Enslaved.org@gmail.com
