Dean Rehberger & Walter Hawthorne | Finding People
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2019-05-29

Dean Rehberger and Walter Hawthorne | Michigan State University

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a grant of $1,472,000 to Michigan State University — the History Department and Matrix — to support the development of a project titled Enslaved: The People of the Historic Slave Trade. When completed, Enslaved will be a one-of-a-kind online data hub that promises to change fundamentally the way scholars and the general public understand African slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. Through the website, users can identify enslaved individuals and others involved in the Atlantic slave trade and run quantitative analyses of African and African diaspora populations. What will make Enslaved unique is its ability to deploy advanced digital methods and computational techniques to facilitate searches across multiple online databases that have been created by the world’s leading experts. The project will also expand existing and sponsor the creation of new databases housed at Michigan State University. Users of Enslaved will be able to access data about millions of Africans and their descendants and have the ability to draw conclusions never before dreamed possible. They will have access to data visualization tools with which they will be able to create maps, charts, and graphs. In addition, the project will preserve collections of data about enslaved individuals and the institution of slavery for future generations.

The project will be developed by 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 of higher education in the USA and abroad. This one-and-a-half year project is phase one of a multi-phase plan. In phase one, Matrix and its partners will develop a proof of concept to demonstrate that data can be linked across eight well-established online collections. The partner projects in phase one are African Origins and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database; The Slave Societies Digital Archive,Vanderbilt University; Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography; Dictionary of African Biography and African American National Biography, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University; Freedom Narratives, York University; Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, University College, London; The Liberated Africans Project, University of Colorado Boulder and University of Maryland.

For more information about the 2019 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org.