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.
A. Answering important historical questions
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?
The design of the ASDN digital repository will be based on six pilot datasets containing records
about individual slaves collected by scholars from diverse types of source documents and a wide
range of geographic areas. In addition to being valuable materials to be made accessible to other
scholars and the public for the first time (only one of the datasets is currently available online),
they will be excellent datasets for expanding the descriptive fields in the ASDN repository and
testing the digital analytical tools.
PI Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Louisiana Slave Database 1719-1820 (LSD) contains some 100,000
descriptions of slaves recorded collected over a period of 15 years from numerous original
manuscript sources. The following table lists the types of sources that were consulted and the
number of slaves found in each type of document.
Types of Source Documents in Louisiana Slave Database
Document Type Frequency
Estate inventory 27,638
Estate sale 3,761
Sale (other than probate) 50,124
Criminal litigation 150
Other litigation 6
Mortgage 930
Marriage contract 964
Will 463
Seizure for debt 574
Confiscation in criminal proceedings 13
Report of runaway 196
Miscellaneous 5,060
List (e.g., census) 1,552
Slave testimony 589
Atlantic Slave Trade Voyage 8,645
Total number of slaves found 100,665
Because of its diverse sources, Hall’s dataset includes a wide range of descriptive data fields,
including but not limited to the type of document in which the slave was described, the location
where the slave lived, name of owner, name of slave, gender, age, racial designation (black,
Indian, mulatto, etc.), African ethnicity when recorded (if born in Africa, as many slaves
documented here were), marriage partner, children, skills, illnesses, injuries, perceived value
(inventory and sale price, if sold alone), and date and retrieval information for the document in
which the slave was described. (See list of 109 fields in the LSD in Appendix A.) This database
was first published as a CD in 2000 and was made available online free of charge in 2001 at:
www.ibiblio.org/laslave. Hall’s work, discussed further in the History, Scope, and Duration
section, was recognized in Rediscovering America: 35 Years of the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH, 2001).
In 2005, PI Walter Hawthorne assembled his Maranhão Inventories Slave Database (MISD),
containing information about almost 8,500 slaves in the Brazilian state of Maranhão (located in
the Amazonia region) from 1767-1832. Hawthorne discovered the documents that comprise the
basis for the MISD in the Arquivo Histórical do Ministério das Finanças.in Maranhão. There they
sit uncatalogued in boxes rarely viewed by professional historians. The documents are plantation
inventories, which were recorded by the state when planters in the captaincy died. Among other
things listed in the inventories are details about slave holdings, including slaves’ names,
ethnicities, genders, skills, values and injuries. The documents provide rare details of slave
populations recorded in a standardized way beginning in an early period of Amazonian
development as a colony.
Douglas B. Chambers, Associate Professor of History at University of Southern Mississippi, will
contribute his dataset, ―Jamaican Runaways: A Compilation of Fugitive Slaves, 1718-1817‖
(2004), based on newspaper ads for approximately 7,500 runaway slaves from Jamaica, about
half of whom were African.
Virginia Meacham Gould, Adjunct Faculty, Department of History at Tulane University has
compiled datasets based on civil documents, including police records, as well as Catholic Church
sacramental records in New Orleans (1727-1852) and Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida
(1809-1843), from which she has published both books and journal articles.1
Paul F. LaChance has agreed to contribute all his databases about Louisiana including ―Index to
New Orleans Indentures, 1809-1843,‖ which contains records from 1809 to 1843 in five indenture books
housed in the Office of the Mayor of New Orleans. The indentures are an exceptionally rich
source regarding both the characteristics of the indentured apprentice or laborer and the
conditions of the contract: the years of service owed the employer and what the worker (many of
whom were slave apprentices) or the master of the slave was promised in return.2
O. Vernon Burton will contribute census data records about slaves that he collected about
Edgefield District, South Carolina, which he used for his book, In My Father’s House are Many
Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, SC (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1985).
1 Virginia Meacham Gould’s publications using this research include: Chained to the Rock of
Adversity: To be free, Black & Female in the Old South, Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1998; ―The Parish Identities of Free Creoles of Color in Pensacola and Mobile, 1698-1860,‖ U.S.
Catholic Historian, Vol. 14, No. 3, Parishes and Peoples: Religious and Social Meanings, Part
Two (Summer, 1996), pp. 1-10; (with Emily Clark), ―The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in
New Orleans, 1727-1852,‖ The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Apr.,
2002), pp. 409-448.
2
See fuller description of Paul LaChance’s dataset at: http://nutrias.org/~nopl/inv/indentures/ind-
intr.htm.
A number of other scholars have compiled databases about individual slaves in the U.S. and
abroad that have not been made publicly available. We believe there will be wide interest in
adding to the ASDN database, thus making it an increasingly rich resource about slaves
throughout the Atlantic World. For example, beginning two decades ago, Manolo Florentino
constructed databases in Brazil using dBASE for DOS software. Laird Bergad, Fé Iglesias and
Maria Carmen Barcelo have created a slave sale database from documents in Cuba, and Bergad
created slave databases for Matanzas, Cuba and Minas Gerais, Brazil, but these have not yet been
made available to other scholars. As the collection of ASDN datasets expand, it has the promise
of bringing many scholars into a collaborative space to conduct research on new topics, including
international comparative analysis, based upon vast quantitative data that will be available for
analysis together for the first time
At present, people combing through historical sources for genealogical research are ahead of
humanities scholars in making their data available publicly online. Amateur genealogists are an
important audience for the ASDN project, and we expect that many users searching the ASDN
datasets will come with this interest. Many of these people become interested in history inspired
by their genealogical research and become very competent amateur historians. AfriGeneas –
African Ancestored Genealogy (http://www.afrigeneas.com/), an impressive website hosted at
Mississippi State University, is a freely-accessible site with both rich data and valuable discussion
networks. The almost 4,000 people following AfriGeneas in the few months since it went on
Facebook in spring 2010 attest to the large community of African-Americans and others doing
genealogical research about slave ancestors. The ancestry.com commercial websites in both the
United Kingdom3 and United States have expanded their records of former slaves, making the
basic index data available to the public but historical documents available by subscription only.
For example, records from the Slave Manifests Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807-1860
Forms (http://community.ancestry.com/project.ashx?pid=31204) will soon go live on
ancestry.com. This is an Ancestry World Archives Project in which data have been entered by
volunteers from online digitized documents. But the fields are chosen based on the interests of
genealogists not historians. For example, while the slave manifest documents include the height
of each slave, this information was expressly excluded from ancestry.com’s data entry system.4
Why have few humanities scholars working in the field of Atlantic slavery—who are the project’s
primary audience—made their datasets available online? Several factors are at play. First, they
have not had access to the technology to put their databases online and some were reluctant to do
so because of professional hesitancy about sharing data. Second, for many humanities scholars,
SPSS or other statistical programs are not really accessible. A new generation of digital tools is
needed, and very few websites with large datasets for humanities research are yet providing them.
B. Relation to Existing Databases and Scholarly Networks
Many decades of research about slave voyages by numerous scholars following in the path of
Philip D. Curtain have culminated in the ambitious and innovative large-scale slave database
hosted at Emory University—Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD2). It has
3 Ancestry.co.uk is providing access to lists of slaves from British colonies, including Slave
Registers of former British Colonial Dependencies, 1812-1834
(http://search.ancestry.co.uk/iexec/Default.aspx?htx=List&dbid=1129&offerid=0:78).
4
The 101 Best Websites of 2010 named by Family Tree Magazine lists other valuable online
sources in the ―Best Sites for African-American Roots‖ category.
(http://familytreemagazine.com/article/101-Best-Websites-2010)
received substantial financial support from NEH and deserved praise from scholars. Several
historians working on the ASDN also participate in the TSTD2 project. PI Hawthorne has advised
on this project and two scholars who have agreed to serve on the ASDN Advisory Board also
work with the TSTD2: Manolo Florentino is one of four primary editors, and Paul LaChance is a
member of the Development Team.
The TSTD2 project documents about 35,000 slave ship voyages. On the site, users can trace
flows of slave trade voyages from ports in Africa to ports in the Americas and can generate
information about, among other things, the volume of those flows over time. TSTD2 shows better
than any other scholarship the nature of the linkages between broad regions of Africa and broad
regions of the Americas. TSTD2 allows examinations of port-to-port transfers of African slaves;
ASDN will permit users to peer beyond regions and/or ports of departure and ports of arrival and
into voyages by land and sea beyond these ports of departure and arrival and into African and
American interiors.
What the TSTD2 does not contain, but the ASDN will contain, is information about the enslaved
Africans aboard these ships including their final destinations in the Americas. TSTD2 PI David
Eltis and others wrote that there is very little information in voyage documents about the names
or ethnic designations of the slave ―cargo‖ aboard these ships.5 The exception is the 67,000
―recaptives‖ returned to Africa - Africans liberated by British anti-slave trade patrols from slave
ships they captured after Britain outlawed the African slave trade in 1808. These recaptives have
been entered in the TSTD2’s African Names Database. Although of great interest, these named
slaves involve a relatively small time and place within the context of the Atlantic slave trade.
The Atlantic Slave Data Network, with its focus on biographical information and calculations
about slaves and their descendants, will not, then, replicate the TSTD2 in any way either in
content or as a tool. The ASDN data fields flow from descriptions of individual slaves, not of
slave trade voyages. It will be a wholly different data collection that will augment and be
augmented by knowledge and experience gained from TSTD2 and will encourage further
research.
C. Preserving data collected by scholars and making it accessible for collaborative research
Too often, valuable historical data that are carefully collected by individual scholars are
subsequently lost. After a specific article or monograph is finished, scholars may lock the data
away in file cabinets or discard it. This project will build a digital repository where scholars can
deposit and then share their data. Many scholars have a strong interest in preserving their data,
although migrating it to new formats is often daunting.
Many scholars feel ambivalent about sharing their research data with others, however, having
spent a significant amount of their precious research time searching for and compiling it. Here, a
shift in the culture of scholarship from individual production to scholarly collaboration is needed.
The ASDN will offer a model intended to assist in this cultural shift.
5Eltis, David, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, ―AHR Exchange: Black, Brown, or White?
Color-Coding American Commercial Rice Cultivation with Slave Labor,‖ American Historical
Review, February 2010, pp 165-171.
Scholars whose datasets are approved as being relevant to Atlantic slavery and of good quality by
a rotating editorial committee will be able to obtain the benefits of preserving their data and using
the site’s digital tools while they initially analyze their data privately. Scholars will have the
option to make their datasets inaccessible to others (in a password-protected section of the digital
repository) for a period of time to be decided by the editorial committee. Although the project is
founded on the principle that broad sharing of data is valuable to humanities scholarship, we
recognize that scholars often need to publish articles and books based on data they have collected
over a considerable period of time. Sensitive to this concern, we want to ensure that scholars
(especially outside the U.S.) do not see this project as an attempt to ―grab‖ data. Scholars will be
assured that the ASDN site will back up their data on multiple servers and make it accessible to
them anywhere in the world in an easy-to-analyze fashion. Once these scholars have made private
use of material they have collected for the time period established by the ASDN project, their
datasets will be opened along with the other datasets on the ASDN site for use by scholars and the
public. We envision that allowing scholars to ―stage‖ their data releases will help them to move
towards open access.
D. Creating Tools for Data Analysis
Historians, their students, and the public are often unaware of how to use statistical and graphing
tools, such as SPSS, SAS or ORACLE, all of which are expensive, proprietary software, to
manipulate and make sense of data. This is particularly true of scholars in poor countries in
Africa and the Americas who often have no access to expensive data analysis tools. There is a
tremendous digital divide between the U.S.-based scholars and our colleagues in Africa and the
Americas. For many, the value of quantitative data remains a mystery. Moreover, even those
knowledgeable of such tools often work alone and are unable to collect the density of data
necessary to make broad claims about African and African-American slaves’ lives (or the lives of
any population). The proposed innovative ASDN will create new tools to encourage and assist in
collaborative, international studies of massive and widely scattered collections of materials about
slavery in the Atlantic World.
The digital repository that will be used for ASDN is the open source application KORA
(http://kora.sourceforge.net/), designed by Michigan State University’s MATRIX digital
humanities center and now in its third-generation. KORA has been used successfully to create
websites with large quantities of digital objects. (See: http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2008/11/kora_sheet.pdf.) Because KORA is a robust web-based application, the
distributed development of collections and datasets where multiple users can simultaneously
work with the same resource from separate locations at the same time is possible. This capacity
can facilitate the rapid development of multiple online datasets contributed by multiple project
participants located in places scattered far and wide.
MATRIX has national and international experience using this application to build collaborative,
educational digital projects with multiple partnering institutions and scholars, particularly in
Africa. We will create both written instructions and a web-based tutorial—initially in English,
French, Spanish, and Portuguese—explaining how to enter data into the ASDN schema in
KORA. The project will take advantage of KORA’s multilingual capabilities; the ASDN data
ingestion pages, data fields, and controlled vocabulary for many of the fields will be translated
into French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Making statistical data easily available and securely preserved is, then, one aspect of the project.
Making that data understandable is another. Scholars and students—and anyone with Internet
access—will be able to search and browse (or download) individual datasets or the entire
collection of datasets. Users will be able to formulate questions (like those spelled out in section
I.A. above), and get calculated answers not only in the form of numbers but also visual graphs:
pie and line charts and histograms. Also, the project will build a flash-based visualization
platform that will work with KORA that will allow users to map the data; maps of the Americas
and Africa will illustrate from the places where individual slaves (based on ethnic identifications)
hailed and to where they were finally brought. A time scrubber will allow scholars and students to
see temporal and spatial shifts in patterns, a visualization of the slave trade attached to names and
individuals. The map visualizations will be especially appealing to teachers and students, as they
will link visually specific places in Europe, the Americas and Africa to other places in Africa,
connecting the slave trade to real people.
E. Making Social Knowledge Networking Available
The ASDN project will have extensive social knowledge networking features that will be
designed not only to stimulate communication and collaboration among the diverse range of
scholars interested in slavery, but to break down traditional knowledge silos, open new
perspectives, and facilitate the advancement of knowledge within the domain. To these ends, the
ASDN project will have several core concepts that cut across the user generated social content.
The most important of these are tags. All user-generated content discussed below (regardless of
how formal or informal it is) is taggable. These tags are vital for the creation of connections
between scholars and research.
In addition to tags, the ASDN project will include a range of features, all of which are designed to
facilitate the advancement of knowledge within the domain. First and foremost, the system will
feature a variety of ways for scholars to contribute original content (either standalone or linked to
data within the system):
Threads. Threads are the most informal unit of user-generated knowledge in the ASDN
project. The feature will allow scholars to post short, almost casual, pieces of content. These
could include original thoughts or simply contextualized links to other content (internal or
external). Threads, which are analogous to microblogging, are designed specifically as a low
cost way for scholars to contribute content.
Research Notes. This feature is the basic unit of formal user-generated knowledge in the
ASDN project. Each user has their own set of Research Notes, into which everything of value
relating to their research or scholarly activities goes: preliminary conclusions, field
observations, textual analysis, notes, etc. While Research Notes resemble blog posts, they are
not personal or professional announcements. Instead, they are substantive units of research
thought. As with all scholar-generated content, Research Notes are taggable, thereby
facilitating connections between scholars.
Research Discussions. While scholars have the ability to engage in discussions around
specific pieces of content (Threads & Research Notes), they also will be able to initiate
standalone discussions. Like other user-generated content in the ASDN project, Research
Discussions will be taggable, thereby allowing them to be included in system-wide searches
and content interconnectivity. We anticipate that Research Discussions will focus on a wide
variety of issues: interpreting data (such as the meaning of certain ethnonyms when written in
a variety of languages and with changing meanings over time and place, the way in which
slaves’ ages were determined, the rootedness of specific African names to a specific region,
etc.), research strategies using various sources documents, what analysis of the data reveals
(and sharing of calculations that can be replicated and checked), and approaches to teaching
the next generation of scholars about Atlantic slavery and analysis of large-scale datasets in
the humanities.
Knowledge Collections. ASDN users will have the ability to create Knowledge Collection,
to which any unit of content (Threads, Research Notes, and Research Discussions) can be
added. These Knowledge Collections can then be contextualized by the collection’s ―curator,‖
and shared with other ASDN users. Knowledge Collections will allow combination (and
recombination) of knowledge, producing new insight into a particular topic.
Research Connections. The ASDN system will create connections between scholars who
might be working in the same intellectual space (or complementary intellectual spaces) but,
because they are in different sub-disciplines, might never become aware of each other’s work
because they do not publish within the same journals or attend the same conferences -
essentially, they don’t travel within the same academic ―circles.‖ These connections will be
displayed as recommendations, and will be generated automatically by the system (based on
tags created by users to describe their areas of research) and by the users themselves.
In sum, the project will make tremendous amounts of data available to scholars, students and
general audiences throughout the world by using the latest best practices in digital technology and
social knowledge networking to study, organize, and make new connections among previously
inaccessible data. This ASDN project also will lay the basis for expanding innovative tools in
comparative, international humanities; increase international collaboration among scholars,
especially those with limited funds for advanced technology and travel; and promote global
understanding and consciousness.
F. Selection Criteria for Datasets and Designating Database Fields
We face a number of methodological and practical issues with this project that we have begun to
address in meetings with scholars engaged in the study of Atlantic slavery.
1) Selection Criteria: The ASDN repository and digital tools will be available for datasets
the records of which are named individual slaves. Datasets collected by scholars will be
reviewed by a rotating board of experts who will determine the quality of the data before
being posted. Datasets from throughout the Atlantic World and from diverse source
documents will be welcome.
2) Descriptive Fields in the Database: Hawthorne and Hall, other scholars contributing pilot
datasets, and the Advisory Board will develop a comprehensive list of fields to be included
in the ASDN digital repository schema. In a meeting in June 2010 at the Harriet Tubman
Institute for the Study of Migration of African Peoples at York University with faculty
(including ASDN Advisory Board member Paul Lovejoy and historian of Angola José
Curto) and graduate students, we began this discussion. Fields need to reflect the full range
of data that are available in different types of source documents, as well as bibliographical
and retrieval information about each record from the sources themselves. Both accuracy of
transcription from sources and standardization are essential for a database that can be used
for calculations and comparison across datasets. Standardized lists of values for particular
characteristics of slaves can be quite extensive, as can be seen by the list of values about
illnesses and skills in Hall’s dataset that appear in Appendix B. One clear example of the
need for standardization is ethnonyms, the spelling of which and meaning of which varies
greatly from document to document. For example, in documents Hawthorne has examined,
the ethnic group Balanta is often written Balante, Balant, Ballanta, and Ballandra. ―Nago‖
in one era may appear as ―Yoruba‖ in another. Spelling of place names also differ, as do the
nature of how professions are characterized. To address these issues will require sets of
―documentary fields‖ and ―imputed fields.‖ ―Documentary fields‖ will contain the exact
spellings of words as they appear in historical sources that are consulted. ―Imputed fields‖
will contain an expanding list of ―standardized spellings.‖ Hence, for a slave named Joze
who is recorded as Ballanta in a given record, the ―documentary ethnicity‖ would be
entered as ―Ballanta‖ and ―imputed ethnicity‖ as ―Balanta,‖ the standardized spelling. A
notes field will allow for explanations of how an imputed entry was derived. The
challenges of both creating standardized values for descriptive data and deriving imputed
data are hardly new; they has been addressed by the TSTD2 project, although for a very
different set of data fields.6 Also, seminal exchanges about African ethnicities in Louisiana
took place on the H-Africa discussion list during the 1990s.7 The Discussion Logs of H-
Africa messages since March 1995 are available at: http://www.h-net.org/~africa/. The
ASDN project will benefit from the experience of the TSTD2 and will further the debate
about these issues in the ASDN scholarly network.
G. Providing Access to Historical Objects
While this project is primarily aimed at preserving and providing access to information about
Atlantic slaves and slavery codified in a database, the site will enable scholars to display
documents and images associated with their datasets. We recognize the value of digitizing large
collections of documents and having them made accessible online. However, our task as
historians is more than to preserve digital images of primary sources. The overarching purpose of
this project is to enable scholars to collaborate in providing access to data from multiple sources
and interpreting them. Scholars working at archives and libraries where digitizing is possible will
be able to upload digital objects with appropriate descriptive metadata and associate these objects
with the records containing data derived from them. This will allow other scholars to observe
directly their practices in recording data into their dataset and will also preserve the source
material itself in the project’s digital repository. (See sample source document and record derived
from it in Hall’s LSD in Appendix C.) We will not require that all scholars who contribute
datasets to digitize documents from which they have derived data, although providing samples of
original documents will be strongly encouraged. We recognize that scholars in many parts of the
world do not have access to digital cameras or scanners. Also, implementing best practices for
digitizing archival materials requires considerable time and financial resources that are often
prohibitive. Moreover, many archives do not allow digitization of materials in their collections.
Finally, great collections have already been databased without digital files being made to
accompany entries. We will provide best practice guidelines for digitization for scholars who
undertake both digitizing and data collection to add to the data network. These standards will
assist particularly another important audience of the project—ambitious new junior scholars,
graduate students and undergraduates who are beginning their research and are interested in
digital scholarship.
6 The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Codebook: SPSS Expanded Dataset, 2008 Edition
(http://slavevoyages.org/downloads/Codebook-SPSS2008.pdf)
7 Discussion Logs of H-Africa messages are available at: http://www.h-net.org/~africa/.
II. HISTORY, SCOPE AND DURATION
A. History of Hall’s and Hawthorne’s database research leading to the ASDN
The Atlantic Slave Data Network is grounded in the research of Principal Investigators
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Walter Hawthorne and the datasets they have collected. A pioneer in
the digital humanities domain, Hall spent a large part of her career constructing the Louisiana
Slave Database 1719-1820 (LSD). The LSD was begun in 1984, and results from calculations
were first published in the applicant’s book, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of
Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1992, pb1995), which received
nine book prizes. An expanded database was created under an NEH Collaborative Research grant
awarded in 1991. Databases and supporting documentation, calculations, and images were first
published on a CD.8 This CD publication includes census databases and spreadsheets by Jeffrey
and Virginia Gould and Paul LaChance, all attendees at the Gulf South Database Group
Conference in January 1993 at the Historic New Orleans Collection under the original NEH
Collaborative Research contract. It was attended by 25 scholars from the United States and
Canada, including also Jane I. Landers and Patrick Manning. The Louisiana Slave Database was
created primarily as a tool for historical research. But it took on a life of its own and attracted a
great deal of attention from the media and the wider public, both in the United States and abroad.
This can be explained by its innovative methodology as well as the hunger for concrete
knowledge about slaves.
On Sunday, July 30, 2000, the New York Times published a front-page story about the LSD
(David Firestone, ―Louisiana Slaves Lose their Anonymity,‖
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/073000la-slaves.html). In November 2001, a website
with a user-friendly search engine was mounted by ibiblio at the University of North Carolina
(http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave), but it omits a few important fields and does not include
manumission records in the search engine. The databases and supporting files can be downloaded
from this web site free of charge.
Hall’s database has received positive reviews in the United States and as far away as Senegal and
increased usage with various audiences.9 It has been incorporated into the www.ancestry.com
search engine, as well. Calculations were used in the applicant’s most recent book, Slavery and
African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, 2005, pb2007) as well as in
other publications. Andres Perez y Mena wrote a lesson plan for high school students for the LSD
as a fellowship project for Colombia Teachers' College. Hall demonstrated how to use her
database to Advanced Placement high school history students, which was broadcast throughout
high schools in Central New Jersey.
8 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy
1699–1860: Computerized Information from Original Manuscript Sources (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
9
See untitled review by Daniel C. Littlefield of ―Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana
History and Genealogy, 1699-1860: Information from Original Manuscript Sources‖ by
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and ―The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM‖ by
David Eltis ; Stephen, D. Behrendt; David Richardson ; Herbert S. Klein, The Journal of
American History, Vol. 89, No. 1 (June, 2002), pp. 197-199.
Nine years after being put online, user statistics provided by ibiblio document that the Louisiana
Slave Database is still being widely used. The site received an average of 1,677 hits per day
during the 11 months up to June 30, 2010. The most recent monthly statistics reported a total of
21,355 page views, including 13,000 views of the search page and 93 users who went to the
webpage where datasets or dataset explanatory codesheets can be downloaded. Ibiblio does not
have the resources to add records to the database or create the broader network in this proposal.
In July 2010, the LSD database was named by Family Tree Magazine as one of the 101 Best
Websites of 2010 for genealogical research.10 Hall regularly receives thanks from people who
were able to trace their ancestry using her database. One exciting recent example is Lieutenant
Commander Michael Nolden Henderson, a retired U.S. Naval Officer and graduate of Xavier
University of Louisiana, who, on June 29, 2010, became the first African American in Georgia to
be inducted into National Society Sons of the American Revolution, thanks to information he
uncovered in the LSD. The story of Henderson's research about his fourth generation great-
grandparents is the subject of an upcoming segment on the PBS The History Detectives series.
The recognition of this database attests to its value for amateur historians, but the ASDN project,
with its easy-to-use tools, will make it more accessible and useful to humanist scholars who
heretofore have had to rely on SPSS to analyze the data.
In 2005, Hawthorne assembled his Maranhão Inventories Slave Database (MISD), containing
information about almost 8,500 slaves in the Brazilian state of Maranhão (located in the
Amazonia region) from 1767-1832. The more recently created MISD is an ideal companion piece
to the LSD. Hawthorne recorded data for it when he was in Brazil with funding from a Fulbright
Hays Faculty Research Fellowship, and he received an NEH Faculty Fellowship in 2008-09 to
analyze the data and write a book manuscript, The resulting book, From Africa to Brazil: Culture,
Identity and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600 to 1830, will be published by Cambridge University
Press in September 2010. Data from LSD and MISD also served as the main evidentiary source
for companion articles by Hall and Hawthorne in the February 2010 issue of American Historical
Review. Hawthorne plans a second major research trip to Brazil’s other Amazonian state—Pará—
to augment data that comprise the MISD.
B. Scope and Duration of the African Slave Data Network Project
Phase 1: Network Development. We will create schema in a digital repository for the project.
The six pilot datasets will be cross-walked and ingested into the repository. To create a database
where a network of scholars can incorporate other datasets from a variety of sources and
geographical areas, we will undertake the major task of developing a comprehensive list of
database fields and protocols for data collection that take into account the work of similar projects
and the scholarly debates on the complex topic of data collection about individual slaves.
Controlled vocabulary for many fields will also be developed, building on the pilot datasets.
Translations of field names and controlled vocabulary for a number of fields will be provided
initially in French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English. Database schema will also be
created for digitized source documents and descriptive metadata about them, which will be able
to be linked to database records derived from them.
During this phase, MATRIX will begin to develop the scholarly knowledge networking
applications, working with the PIs and Advisory Board to carefully establish needs and uses for
them. Cross-language communications among scholars (and also in developing the database
10
http://familytreemagazine.com/article/101-Best-Websites-2010
translations) will be facilitated because our Principal Investigators are fluent in French, Spanish
and Portuguese.
Phase 2: Network Integration. Additional scholars will be invited to join the data network and
encouraged to contribute slave data. Development of the scholarly network platform will continue
as use, needed revision, and enhancements will dictate. The work of finding and collecting slave
data can be painstaking and difficult, and often years of work can lead to only small returns. By
establishing a data network, the smaller sets can be enhanced by being made accessible along
with the work of others. By creating a platform of sharing and exchange, scholars can be
encouraged to improve methods, follow best practices, and help new scholars into the field.
During this phase, development of digital tools will begin for visualizing data, including mapping
movements of Africans of various ethnicities and their descendants over both time and space.
Phase 3: Network Sourcing. Beyond contributing datasets, the network of scholars will be
encouraged to submit sample documents, photographs, lesson plans, as well as short explanations
of how they collected their data (problems and solutions). This material can be used not only to
enhance the site for teaching and learning, but will help to build a stronger network as scholar
begin to see the ASDN as a place to turn to for scholarly expertise and information sharing.
To facilitate this work, project researchers will develop sample collections of original historical
documents and photographs that complement the datasets. Some model lesson plans will be
made available for teachers.
Future Plans: In sum, during the grant period we will produce a flexible, extensible database,
the records of which will be based on individual slaves. Additional participating scholars will be
able to enter new records into the digital repository, keeping their data private for a period of
time, making use of advanced analytical tools, and later releasing their data to the public. Beyond
the grant period, we envision continuing to demonstrate and disseminate information about the
Atlantic Slave Data Network at conferences and in professional publications, to train new
scholars in the data networks capabilities, and to invite them to participate. We also envision
developing the data network further as a teaching tool by working with teachers to create course
plans around specific sets of data as they become available. We will further explore ways to
integrate this data network with other existing online slave datasets that address issues
surrounding slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. The PIs and Advisory Board will listen closely
to scholars’ input into the Research Discussions and will track use of all features of the website.
Further development, based on user feedback, will include enhancing interface and tools
usability; expanding to other languages; engaging with a continually expanding, interdisciplinary
community of scholars; and growing the number of datasets.
III. METHODOLOGY AND STANDARDS
KORA digital repository: MATRIX's open source digital repository application will be used to
store access copies of the project's digital content – both datasets and digitized historical objects –
and display them online. KORA’s architecture is unique in that it can accommodate any set of
metadata schema in individualized digital datasets. Project staff can easily create metadata
elements using a simple point-and-click interface, select the type of form control for each element
(e.g., required formats for date, URL, audio file upload, etc.), and then determine whether the
element is required for each record and if it should appear in database search returns and
advanced search feature. KORA automatically generates storage structures, ingestion forms, and
validation requirements for each metadata scheme.
KORA, developed with funding from the NSF Digital Library Initiative, IMLS, and NEH, has
three main strengths in relation to other digital repository packages. First, designed for small and
medium-sized institutions with limited technological resources, KORA greatly facilitates
ingestion. The modular programming, accessible from any Internet connection and browser
platform, allows users to master the technology using a project-specific training manual.
A MATRIX team, including experts in electronic records archiving, libraries, and programming,
undertook to rewrite and improve the KORA application in 2008-09 with an emphasis on best
practices in digital preservation. In keeping with the need to ensure authenticity and integrity of
files ingested into KORA, as described in the International Research on Permanent Authentic
Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) guidelines, automatic fixity checking has been built
into the new version of KORA to verify that data has been kept free of tampering and corruption.
Long-term access to digital material can be assured by storing this preservation information in the
digital repository, as described by the ISO Reference Model for an Open Archival Information
System (OAIS) model and Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS).
Interoperability: Using best practices in digital archiving, the digital repository, KORA, has
been optimized for interoperability. The Biographies will comply with the Open Archives
Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standard for sharing metadata so
metadata about digital objects may be harvested and aggregated for use by other repositories.
This work will build upon KORA’s already-implemented MySQL and XML platform-agnostic
data design in a manner that allows extensible interoperability between repositories.
Digital Preservation Strategies: The KORA digital repository system incorporates several
digital preservation strategies, particularly as regards the generation and regular checking of fixity
information on ingested files and the ability to add technical metadata to KORA records (as
discussed above). The files stored in the KORA system on MATRIX servers will be access
copies.
Preservation copies of the files will be stored on archival quality tape and kept in MATRIX's
climate-controlled digital laboratory. These tapes will be sampled annually to ensure readability,
and the data will be refreshed to new media every five years. To guard against file format
obsolescence, format (data) migration plans that preserve the significant properties of the digital
objects will be specified and developed for both access and preservation files.
Establishing comprehensive fields for records about slaves: To create a collaborative site
where large quantities of data from multiple datasets about individual slaves will be made
accessible, it is necessary to create a list of fields to be used in the digital repository scheme that
will be at once as comprehensive as possible and expandable. This requires consultation with
experts in the field and careful review of the history of datasets about individual slaves.
Consultation will begin with the distinguished group of historians from the United States,
Senegal, Brazil, Trinidad, Canada, and Cuba (teaching in the United Kingdom) who have agreed
to serve on the Advisory Board. An expanding scholarly community will be brought into this
process via the social knowledge networking on the website.
The six pilot datasets provide good initial diversity of geographical location (Louisiana, South
Carolina, Alabama, Florida, and Brazil), languages (English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese),
and source documents that are needed to begin development of fields and controlled vocabularies.
Other datasets known to the PIs and members of the Advisory Board also will be consulted. The
first pilot dataset, Hall’s Louisiana Slave Database, is unusually extensive, having been created
over a period of 15 years and by consulting 15 types of sources (see Table on page 3. The list of
its field, shown in Appendix A, provides an extremely rich starting point. Hall also developed
extensive controlled vocabularies for many of these fields. Appendix B gives samples of terms
for the fields concerning Sickness (99 terms) and Skills (159 terms).
In addition to the expertise brought by the historians on the project, MATRIX has valuable
experience created and documenting comprehensive fields and controlled vocabulary for a digital
humanities project. The Quilt Index, a project of MATRIX, the Michigan State University
Museum, and The Alliance for the American Quilt, has worked since 2000 to create what has
become a definitive list of fields in quilt research (including more than 100 fields for describing
the appearance and composition of a quilt) and a massive digital repository of quilt images and
descriptive metadata. Quilt Index project staff presented a paper about the Quilt Index planning
process and particularly the development of comprehensive fields for the Museums on the Web
conference in 2004.11 This project was funded by an NEH planning grant (2000) and two
Preservation and Access of Humanities Collections grants (2001-2004 and 2006-2009).12
KORA Descriptive Metadata Schema: KORA is extraordinarily flexible, allowing for the
addition of new metadata elements as well as new search and display tools. To support search and
retrieval across all datasets and records in the repository and to support metadata harvesting and
interoperability, MATRIX researchers have developed a Dublin Core scheme (dcKORA) for use
with KORA projects that will be used for schema that hold digitized historical objects including
sample source documents associated with records in datasets. Recommendations for this core
KORA metadata scheme are based on Dublin Core and the Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices
Version 2.1.1 document (September 2006) by the Metadata Working Group of the CDP (formerly
known as Colorado Digitization Project, a partnership of the Colorado Historical Society and
Colorado State Library).13 CDP is a large digital library project that brings together materials
from archives, libraries and small historical centers into a unified repository. MATRIX
researchers adapted the CDP’s metadata best practices to meet MATRIX’s needs by
incorporating suggestions from other metadata standards (e.g., the PBCore used by public
broadcasting entities).
Social Knowledge Networking: During the design and development of the social knowledge
networking portions of the ASDN project, MATRIX will employ a measured, user-centered
design approach. Direct input from members of the Advisory Board as well as key members of
the user community will be solicited at the beginning of the design process in order to determine
the system’s optimum usability. In addition, formative design (both visual and interaction) of the
system will be carried out using a parallel design model. The main design and development of the
system will be done using an iterative design model. This will require conducting a series of
usability tests (both formal and informal) at key stages during the development process, the
results of which will be used to inform changes to the system’s overall design (both visual and
interaction) and usability.
Information Security: MATRIX runs its operations, including its KORA software system, on
several servers kept in a climate controlled, physically secured room; these servers run the Debian
11
Justine Richardson, Michael Fegan, Mark Kornbluh, Dean Rehberger, and Marsha MacDowell,
Bits & Bolts to Bits & Bytes: The Quilt Index On-line Repository and Distributed Archival
Management System, Papers, Museums and the Web 2004.
(http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/papers/richardson/richardson.html)
12 An article about the Quilt Index appeared in NEH’s magazine, Humanities, in 2006. Creel,
Lori, “A Patchwork of History ,‖ Humanities, November/December 2006, Volume 27/Number 6.
(http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2006-11/A_Patchwork_of_History.html)
13 http://www.bcr.org/cdp/best/dublin-core-bp.pdf
distribution of Linux. Incremental tape backups of the data stored on the servers are performed
daily using the NetVault backup software application, with a full backup performed on a weekly
basis. Tapes are taken offsite to another facility on the MSU campus and exchanged for the tapes
stored there the previous week. Backup tapes cycle through the system approximately every six
weeks and are replaced as needed. The MATRIX systems administrator keeps a wiki-based log of
all tape backups. A Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAIDs) divides and replicates data
among multiple hard disk drives for better system reliability.
MATRIX has also adopted two offsite storage plans to better protect and ensure the continued
availability of its server-based data. First, an additional full set of backup tapes is created every
four months and logged into the MATRIX tape backup wiki. Through an arrangement with the
Michigan State University Archives, MATRIX plans to store these tapes in a secure, climate-
controlled storage facility in nearby Lansing, Michigan. These long-term backup tapes are kept
on a three-year retention schedule.
In addition to maintaining the long-term backup tapes at the Lansing storage facility, MATRIX
has a reciprocal storage arrangement with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social
Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 60 miles from the MSU campus.
On a daily basis, ICPSR uses rsync software to synchronize and copy MATRIX data into ―dark‖
storage—that is, storage that cannot be accessed by general users—and MATRIX provides the
same service for ICPSR.
Sustainability: Michigan State University is committed to maintaining the Biographies
repository, network and its related applications in perpetuity. The KORA digital repository
application is used for all MATRIX digital library projects, and MATRIX has invested and will
continue to invest in its development, with institutional commitment from Michigan State
University.
IV. WORK PLAN
The schedule of work for the three-year ASDN project, from May 1, 2011 to April 30, 2014, is
spelled out in six-month phases. (Dissemination activities appear in section VI rather than in the
World Plan.)
Phase I (May – October 2011)
Database: PIs and Advisory Board will develop plan for creating set of comprehensive fields and
controlled vocabularies for ASDN database. Obtain pilot datasets and record and compare field
names and vocabulary for data entry in fields. Design schema in KORA digital repository
application for dataset records of individual slaves and digital source documents.
Digital Tools: PIs, Advisory Board, and MATRIX decide upon and document desired
functionality of digital tools for making calculations from datasets and map visualization
platform.
Networking: Establish networking system among PIs and the Advisory Board and archive content
for possible use in Research Discussions when ASDN website goes live (on such topics as
comprehensive set of data fields and functionality of digital tools useful to humanities scholars).
Begin developing networking features; solicit direct input from members from the Advisory
Board as well as key members of the user community at the beginning of the design process in
order to determine the system’s optimum usability.
Phase II (November 2011 – April 2012)
Database: Migrate first two pilot datasets from PIs Hall and Hawthorne into the ASDN project in
KORA. Begin to draft data guidebook of fields and controlled vocabulary to share with
contributors of other pilot datasets to use for data entry into the KORA schema. Establish
editorial committee and policies and procedures for accepting datasets.
Digital Tools: MATRIX begins design of tools for making calculations and displaying calculation
results.
Networking: Design and development of social knowledge networking features (initial efforts
following parallel design model)
Website: Design beta ASDN website. Write specifications for outputting datasets from KORA to
the ASDN website.
Phase III (May – October 2012)
Database: Migrate third and fourth pilot datasets into KORA. Extend fields and controlled
vocabulary as necessary for additional pilot datasets. Update data guidebook and make it
available online in English for online users of datasets. Translate ASND data ingestion pages into
French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Digital Tools: Implement search and browse functions and downloading for datasets from
KORA. User testing of beta calculations tools leading to possible programming improvements.
Networking: Announce ASDN website and the opportunity for scholars to add datasets (initially
for private use, then to be made public) in scholarly discussion lists and professional associations.
Begin use of Threads, Research Notes, and Research Discussions on the website. Establish user
statistics reporting.
Website: Go live with website with first two pilot collections.
Phase IV (November 2012 – April 2013)
Database: Migrate fifth and sixth pilot datasets into KORA, making any necessary extensions to
data fields and controlled vocabularies. Translate data guidebook into French, Spanish and
Portuguese.
Digital Tools: Go live with calculation tools. Develop map visualization platform.
Networking: Add Knowledge Collections function to the site.
Website: Make third and fourth datasets live on the website, along with display of digital objects
associated with records of datasets for which digital objects are available. Implement private
space in website for dataset contributors who wish to work with their data before it is made
public.
Phase V (May – October 2013)
Database: Accept first contributed datasets beyond the six pilots.
Digital Tools: Go live with map visualization platform. Create video tutorial and written
instructions in English for using calculation functions. Design time scrubber for visualizing
movement over time. Conduct user testing of calculation and visualization tools.
Networking: Add Research Connections function to the site.
Website: Make fifth and sixth datasets live on the website. Make data guidebook available online
in French, Spanish and Portuguese.
Phase VI (November 2013 – April 2014)
Database: Make third and fourth datasets live. Migrate fifth and sixth pilot datasets into KORA.
Digital Tools: Go live with time scrubber tool. Survey users about digital tools.
Networking: Survey users about social knowledge networking features and post results of surveys
to Research Discussion.
Website: Make available online instructions for all digital tools in all four languages. Add sample
lesson plans for high school and undergraduate students.
V. STAFF
Principal Investigators
Walter Hawthorne, Professor of History and Chair of the MSU Department of History (as of
August 15), will serve as Principal Investigator (PI) and Project Director, devoting 20% of his
time to the project. As described in the History Scope, and Duration section, Hawthorne has
considerable experience with quantitative analysis of data about slavery from primary sources in
Brazil.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Adjunct Professor in the MSU Department of History, also will serve as
Principal Investigator, devoting 15% of their time to the project. Hall brings a wealth of
experience with not only compiling her large-scale database but also with the project’s varied
audiences, including historians, linguists, anthropologists, creolists and genealogists interested in
discovering African Americans’ roots in the African continent.
Hawthorne and Hall will jointly be responsible for the design of the database and consultation
with the Advisory Board to develop a comprehensive set of fields and controlled vocabulary for
many fields to create a database that will expand to meet the needs of a wide network of scholars.
Hawthorne will meet regularly with MATRIX staff, and he and Hall will provide input to them
about the digital tools and social networking features to be designed for the project to meet needs
of humanities scholars for analyzing large-scale datasets and networking for collaborative
research. Both Hall and Hawthorne also will reach out to their extensive network of colleagues to
contribute datasets to the project and take advantage of the content, tools, and social knowledge
networking developed by the ASDN project.
Ethan Watrall is an Assistant Professor at MATRIX: The Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and
Social Sciences Online and Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Department
of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media. In addition, he is a Principle Investigator
in the MSU Communication Technology Lab and the Games for Entertainment and Learning
(GEL) Lab. Watrall has written numerous popular press books on user-experience design and
standards-based web design and has presented and published academic work in the area of
cultural heritage informatics, digital scholarly practice, digital humanities, and serious games for
cultural heritage learning. Watrall will devote 15% of his time to this project and will lead the
development of the project’s social knowledge networking features and digital tools and oversee
the work on this project done at MATRIX by the programmer, designer, project manager, and
students.
Atlantic Slave Data Network Advisory Board
Advisory Board members will play crucial roles in developing the project. First, they will work
with PIs Hawthorne and Hall to review and contribute to the list of comprehensive fields needed
for the digital repository to reflect data available from diverse sources. Second, several Advisory
Board members have agreed to contribute datasets that they have created (as described in the
Significance section). Third, they will contribute ideas about tools useful to historians and other
scholars for analyzing large quantities of data that will be used for the final tool design and will
then test beta versions of digital tools created for the project. Fourth, they will provide input and
feedback about social networking applications useful for international discussion and
collaboration. Lastly, they will spread the word about the project and bring into the network their
colleagues and talented students.
The following distinguished scholars have agreed to serve on the Advisory Board. The research
they have done and their engagement in other collaborative projects involving Atlantic slavery
are strong evidence of the significant value that this project will add to the field.
Manuel Barcia, Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Deputy Director of the Institute for
Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds, is a young Afro-Cuban scholar and
author of the outstanding book, Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western
Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848. This book is based heavily on slave testimony in the Conspiracy
of the Ladder trials in Cuba, listing slaves’ ethnic designations.
O. Vernon Burton, Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina
University, was founding director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social
Science (ICHASS) at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana until his retirement, and currently
serves as chair of its Advisory Board. He has agreed to contribute data about slavery in South
Carolina to this project.
Manolo Florentino, faculty member in the Department of History at Universidade Federal do
Rio de Janeiro, is an outstanding Brazilian scholar heavily relying on his own databases for his
publications and, as a member of the TSTD2 Steering Committee, is one of the four primary
editors of TSTD2, responsible mainly for Brazilian and Portuguese voyages.
Linda Heywood, Professor of African History and African-American Studies at Boston
University, is author of many edited books and articles. Her latest book, with John K. Thornton,
Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge
University Press, 2007, won the Herskovits prize of the African Studies Association for the best
scholarly work from the previous year.
Mark Kornbluh, Dean of College of Arts & Sciences, University of Kentucky, is a digital
technologies pioneer. Kornbluh, a historian, is one of the founders of H-Net and was the first
director of the MATRIX digital humanities center at Michigan State University. He was crucial in
the creation of many on-line history projects including The American Black Journal
(http://www.matrix.msu.edu/~abj/) and South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid
(http://overcomingaparatheid.msu.edu), among others.
Paul F. LaChance, Invited Professor of History, University of Ottawa, has wide experience in
database creation. He serves on the TSTD2 Development Team and is the data specialist and
member of the editorial board for the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University
Press, forthcoming, November 2010). He is also a widely published historian of slavery and the
slave trade. LaChance and Hall have worked together on projects for over 15 years.
Paul Lovejoy, Distinguished Research Professor and Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora
History at York University, is deeply engaged in international collaborations in researching
slavery and is widely connected throughout Africa and the Americas as Director of Harriet
Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and head of
UNESCO Slave Trade Archives Project. He has collected a large library of digitized historical
documents from throughout the Atlantic World.
Ibrahima Seck, Assistant Professor of History, Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal,
has researched and published about slavery in Louisiana and helped identify the meanings of
African names in the Louisiana Slave Database. Seck speaks Pulaar, Wolof, French, English, and
Arabic and is an outstanding lecturer in several languages and first-rate international networker.
VI. DISSEMINATION
The ASDN datasets, innovative tools, and international collaboration and networking about
Atlantic slavery will have broad interest within the halls of the academy and beyond. Scholars
from many disciplines and genealogists from each state in the United States and each country in
the Americas where slaves were owned and traded are now keenly interested in studying their
slave and African-descended populations. Many libraries, both public and private, and historical
and genealogy societies will be interested. And many universities, colleges, and schools
throughout the United States, the Americas, and beyond will want to use the ASDN for teaching
about the institution of slavery that has had a profound impact on the history and culture of the
entire Atlantic World.
The ASDN website will be publicized widely and scholars working in this field will be invited to
contribute datasets, analyze other scholars’ datasets, and share their research findings as well as
their suggestions for improving and expanding the project. Messages will be sent through relevant
listservs, including several active discussion lists of H-Net, including H-AFRICA, H-West-
Africa, H-Afro-America, H-Slavery, and H-Atlantic, announcing the datasets and tools for
calculations and mapping as they become available.
We also believe that the ASDN’s development of tools for analyzing large and complex datasets
of interest in the humanities and users’ experience with the social knowledge networking features
will be of interest to the digital humanities field. Results and findings will be circulated and
publicized within this community through the centerNet network of digital humanities centers,
D-Lib Magazine, and other outlets.
The ASDN website will be demonstrated and presented in various ways at annual meetings of
relevant professional associations. In Years One and Three, PI Hall and PI Hawthorne will
demonstrate the prototype at the largest of the conferences: the African Studies Association and
American Historical Association. There will also be opportunities to consult in person with some
members of the Advisory Board at these meetings. In Year Two, Hall will present the prototype
at Southern Historical Association and Association for the Study of the Worldwide African
Diaspora, and Hall and Hawthorne will make a presentation at the Organization of American
Historians. In Year Three, Hall will demonstrate the prototype at the Association of Caribbean
Historians, Caribbean Studies Association, and Association for the Study of African American
Life and History. That same year, Hawthorne will make presentations at the Brazilian Studies
Association and Canadian African Studies Association, in which two Advisory Board members
participate. Dissemination about this important new resource also will occur through media
interviews, articles and reviews in scholarly journals.