New Support for Enslaved Database

September 13, 2019 - Andrew W. Mellon Press Release

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Michigan State University $850,000 for Phase 2 of Enslaved, a collaborative digital project designed to help scholars, students, and the general public to recover the names and life stories of individuals involved in the historic slave trade.  

Enslaved is led by Matrix, MSU’s Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, in partnership with the MSU Department of History in the College of Social Science, and the University of Maryland.  

Phase 2 of Enslaved will greatly expand the platform’s scope and functionality with the addition of more than 20 new data sets.  Along with the discovery tool that allows user to search the multiple sources of data about the historic slave trade, Phase 2 will launch a publishing platform for scholars to publish datasets and digital projects and a set of enslaved stories to make widely available a suite of media-rich narratives about enslaved peoples written to help students, educators, and the general public learn more about historical slavery. 

Photo: Milk and Guinea Grass Sellers, Brazil, 1816-1831, Jean Baptiste Debret, Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Bresil (Paris,1834-39), vol. 2, plate 21, p. 73. as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Phase 1 of the Enslaved project was designed as a proof of concept, exploring the question of whether it was possible to bring together data from disparate sources to empower scholars, students, and the public to meaningfully engage with data on the historic slave trade and identify and recognize the lives of the individual enslaved.  Using the technologies of Linked Open Data (LOD) and Wikibase (the application platform that powers WikiData), Phase 1 of Enslaved proved successful.  

As Walter Hawthorne, Professor of African & Digital History and Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs in the College of Social Science at MSU, explains, "Enslaved brings new digital tools and analytical approaches to the study of African slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. By linking data compiled by some of the world’s foremost historians, it will allow scholars and the general public to learn about individuals’ lives and to draw new, broad conclusions about processes that had an indelible impact on the world." 

Ethan Watrall, Associate Director of Matrix and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, adds that, "Enslaved reaffirms Michigan State University's longstanding commitment to Africa-centered research and to create tools and digital experiences that engage researchers, students, and the public in critical questions about our collective past, culture, and heritage." 

Dean Rehberger, Director of Matrix, leads the project with Hawthorne and Watrall as well as Daryle Williams, Associate Professor of history at the University of Maryland. Williams takes special pride in “activating digital tools to place named individuals at the center of our explorations about the complexities of black identities, labor, family under the constraints of bondage and the aspirations of freedom.” 

The project partner leads from Phase 1 (i.e., David Eltis, Emory University and Paul Lachance, “African Origins and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”; Jane Landers, Vanderbilt University, “The Slave Societies Digital Archive”; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Steven Niven, and Abby Wolf, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, “Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography; Dictionary of African Biography and African American National Biography"; Paul Lovejoy, York University, “Freedom Narratives”; Keith McClelland, University College, London, “Legacies of British Slave-Ownership” ; Henry Lovejoy, University of Colorado Boulder, “The Liberated Africans Project”) continue working on Phase 2 as expert consultants.