Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network introduction

We propose the Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network (ASDN) project to provide a platform for researchers of African slaves in the Atlantic World to upload, analyze, visualize, and utilize data they have collected, and to link it to other datasets, which together will complement each other in such a way as to create a much richer resource than the individual datasets alone. There is a significant need for such a collaborative research site about Atlantic slavery. During the past two decades, there has been a seismic change in perception about what we can know about African slaves and their descendants throughout the Atlantic World (Africa, Europe, North and South America). Scholars have realized that, far from being either non-existent or extremely scarce, various types of documentation about African slaves and their descendants throughout the Atlantic abound in archives, courthouses, churches, government offices, museums, ports, and private collections spread throughout the Atlantic World. Since the 1980s, a number of major databases were constructed in original digital format and used in major publications of their creators, and they lack a platform for preservation and therefore are at risk of being lost as their creators retire. Also, a number of collections of original manuscript documents are beginning to be digitized and made accessible free of charge over the Web. However, our task as historians is more than to preserve images of primary sources; it is to interpret those sources by finding new ways to organize, share, mine and analyze as well as to preserve original materials which might otherwise be discarded or lost.

With support from the NEH Preservation and Access program, the proposed project will create a digital repository with a comprehensive set of fields about slaves to which scholars will be invited to upload, preserve, and provide public access to datasets from diverse sources and regions throughout the Atlantic. The comprehensive fields will be developed based on six pilot datasets and will be added to and refined through consultation among the Principal Investigators, participating scholars who contribute pilot datasets, and a distinguished group of historians who have agreed to serve on the ASDN Advisory Board. The digital repository will also provide for uploading digital files of original source materials. The digital repository schema, fields, and search interface will be made available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with other languages to be added in a later phase.

The ASDN project also will address two major challenges that historians increasingly face: first, to create models for collaborative research in a field that has been dominated by a methodology of—and rewards for—individual research and, second, to analyze vast quantities of data that can now be accessed digitally. With NEH support, tools will be made available to perform calculations and visualize the data that will encourage and assist collaborative, international studies of these numerous but widely scattered collections of materials. Scholars also will be able to discuss various challenges regarding digital research in Atlantic slavery. The stories about lives of slaves as well as the analyses of slavery emerging from this network will be a unique resource for linguists, creolists, anthropologists, economic historians, sociologists, geographers, cartographers, creative writers, and genealogists searching for their African ancestors as well as for historians of slavery.

The ASDN will respond to the NEH Bridging Cultures initiative not only by forming the basis for systematic studies of the presence and influence of African peoples of different ethnicities upon regions throughout the Atlantic World including within the United States but also by creating and supporting an international network of scholars to engage in this study together.

I. SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Never before has it been more important to the humanities to try, as NEH Chairman Jim Leach has recently noted, “to manage a deluge of data and turn bits of information into useful knowledge.” This is particularly true of history. Historians, their students and the public at large are awash in the materials available in digital archives and databases, a flood of data enhanced by global scholarly networks and better access to archives and collections around the world. More than ever, it is crucial to find ways to preserve and manage large stores of quantitative and qualitative data and to make it accessible in ways that important research questions can be asked and well-formed answers derived. To be sure, the task of accumulating, organizing, and making sense of mountains of information from scattered corners of the globe cannot be handled by any one researcher. If the humanities are to advance in transformative ways in this age of globalization, humanists must find new ways to collaborate—to work together on large, international projects. If international collaboration is to occur, humanists in the wealthy countries with best access to new networking and data-analyzing technologies must find ways to make them available to their colleagues in poorer countries. MSU has decades of experience sharing its computer technology with countries in Africa. We propose, then, a collaborative, international project that will lead to the construction of a massive data network available to scholars, teachers, students, and genealogists in the U.S. and abroad. The project will also address the difficult practical, ethical, methodological and, especially, hermeneutic problems scholars face when turning their attention to collecting and analyzing data about African slaves and their descendants.

The ASDN will be a unique, innovative, and valuable resource for scholars and students, African-Americans searching for their roots, and the public interested in humanities research centered on African slaves and their descendants in North America, South America, Europe and Africa itself.

For several decades after the publication in 1969 of Philip D. Curtain’s seminal book, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, much scholarly attention and resources have been focused on quantitative studies of trans-Atlantic slave trade voyages. This research has yielded considerable important scholarship, discussed in the following section about related databases. However, these sources contain relatively little information about individual enslaved Africans.

Recently, a growing number of scholars have been unearthing important data from other sources, such as notarial documents; plantation inventories; police reports; testimony by runaway slaves, conspirators and rebels against slavery, church books of baptism, death and marriage, church Inquisition testimony, government and church censuses, which reveal much about slave life in the New World and about African slaves’ lives in parts of the Old World. These sources focus on individual slaves. When records about many individuals are combined, patterns can be discerned. Data about ethnicities tell us from where within Africa many slaves hailed; data about slave residence in the Americas tell us where members of particular groups ended up and where and how they were housed; data about marriages tell us with whom Africans and their descendants chose to partner; data about skills tell us what slaves did and their contributions to agriculture, trade and the economy beyond brute labor. And this list could go on for pages.

Among the questions that might be asked and answered from multiple, large-scale datasets are:

• 
  What percentage of people by African ethnic group was skilled in X?
  
• 
  On X plantation, what was the gender ratio of slaves by African ethnic group?
  
• 
  What percentage of Africans married people of the same ethnic group?
  
• 
  What were the gender ratios of slaves identified as being of XXXX ethnicity?
  
• 
  What injuries did people performing X type of work most commonly have?
  
• 
  In X period, what was the percentage of slaves in Y place by ethnic group?  
  
• 
  In what records does the slave named XXXX appear?  What were XXXX's professions?
  
• 
  What places did he live? Who were his/her children and children’s children?
  
• 
  What was the value of slaves by ethnicity in X period?  By skills and gender?