DATABASE : Enslaved – People of the Historical Slave Trade

(Source: Enslaved)

We learned of the online launch of the database Enslaved – Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade.

“Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade has a long history with digital collections about enslavement. In 2011, the project originated from an earlier digital humanities project Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities. This project initiated six years of work to develop the needed partnerships as well as plans for possible infrastructure, controlled vocabularies, and data models to do a larger project that would bring together datasets on enslaved people from around the world. A larger project offered many challenges given the disparate, dispersed, and idiosyncratic structure of much of the data.

In 2017, the opportunity to move Enslaved.org project forward came with a planning grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After a successful planning stage, in 2018, the Foundation funded Phase 1 of Enslaved.org, to build a proof of concept. The idea was simple: given the complex nature of the plans and the many problems with the data and the innovative nature of the technologies, we needed to prove the project could be done. After successfully doing so, in 2019, Mellon funded an implementation grant to begin populating Enslaved.org with data and begin publishing the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation as a gateway for including new datasets through peer review into Enslaved.org.

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More info about the project can be found on Enslaved.org