For a digital history review essay, I came across this amazing digital history project: Slave Voyages Digital Memorial Project and Database. https://www.slavevoyages.org/. Created and maintained by the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, https://www.slavevoyages.org/about/about.
Following Jeffrey W. McClurken’s guidelines in his Digital History Reviews section of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) website, this project fits the description for a “digital narrative:” something created for the Internet with digital tools as a secondary source for interpreting the past.[i] The website utilizes data collected from decades of archival research and digitized in order to make it usable and accessible for students, scholars, or anyone wishing to learn more about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Three databases are featured: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes data from over 36,000 slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866, the Intra-American Slave Trade Database contains information on 10,000 slave voyages within the Americas, and the African Names Database provides the African names and demographic information for 91,491 Africans taken from captured slave ships and African trading sites. Users also have access to hundreds of scanned photos and documents documenting people, places, vessels and manuscripts pertaining to the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trades. Where available, each image contains a link to a corresponding voyage in the databases and a reference to the original source.[ii] Users may search for specific information about vessels, routes, and enslaved peoples associated with these voyages and are able to analyze the data and report results as statistical tables, graphs, maps, timelines, and animations.
This detailed digital history database is the result of three years of development by a multi-disciplinary team of historians, web designers, librarians, cartographers, curriculum specialists, and computer programmers working collaboratively with university scholars from Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was the principal sponsor of this work organized at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Hutchins Center of Harvard University.[iii] Starting in the late 1960s, Herbert S. Klein and other historians began to collect archival data on slave-trading voyages from unpublished sources and code them into a machine-readable format. Major additions to the data sets and revisions were done in the 1990s, and from 2015-2018 when the website was completely re-coded and modernized with additional funding from the NEH.[iv]
Users may select the About tab from the upper-right menu bar to discover detailed information on the project’s history, the website’s creators, and the project contributors. When visiting the website for the first time, users will notice a clean, well-organized main page featuring easy-to-see links to different areas and subheadings in bright blue. The main title “Explore the Dispersal of Enslaved Africans Across the Atlantic World” is followed by a brief statement of purpose and an invitation to use the site for the analysis of slave trade data, viewing interactive maps, timelines, and animations. Artistically, the colors, graphics, and background animation using archival photos is pleasing to the eye and encourages further investigation by students and researchers, unlike many main pages that look hastily-made and boring. The main page also features a link to a 6-minute orientation video introduced by African-American literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates that orients first-time visitors and provides a brief history of the site.
The video includes a site walkthrough by its creators, showing viewers how to utilize the searchable databases. This orientation video is likely very effective in encouraging users to explore the site further, as it illustrates how to get the most out of the site’s features and why the information presented is significant. Navigating the site is very easy, especially after watching the short orientation video. No matter what link you select, there are tandard tabs on every page in the upper-right menu bar that link to main content areas: it’s unnecessary to backtrack or search in order to return to another area. The entire site is accessible in English, Spanish, and Portuguese through a translation selection tab in the upper-right menu bar, which is also available on every page. All links function perfectly and while there is much information, it is organized in a way that would not make it an overwhelming or daunting experience, even for an undergraduate student with little research experience.
For example, I selected the Trans-Atlantic tab from the upper-right menu bar. A list of options appears, and selecting the first option (Understanding the Database) takes the user to a three-paragraph introduction by Dr. David Eltis at Emory University on the slave trade and its significance. On the left is another list where users may discover more information on data sets, terminology, and variables. Each database lists a Nature of the Sources section where the original data sources and contributing scholars are explained in detail. Returning to the top menu, I selected the database option, and data from 36,108 slave voyage entries appears in a clear-to-read table. Using a menu on the top left, users may view tabs labeled Summary statistics, Tables, Data visualization, Timelines, and Maps for the entire data set or for certain selected categories and variables. Users may easily manipulate the data in many different ways, using the top left menu to select for certain year ranges, ships by nation, itineraries, dates, captain and crew names, outcomes, and specific data sources.
As someone who is not the most well-versed in using a database, I was easily able to select data only from British slave ships with a date range of 1514-1586. Instantly, interactive maps, a timeline, charts, tables, and other features were available for me to access based on the variables I chose. It is also easy to choose new sets of variables and begin the process over. Users may also download the data into CSV or Excel formats. The site is definitely designed for scholars, teachers, and college-level students, but its ease of use will attract anyone who seeks information about the slave trade. Its digital tools and online databases create more opportunities for users to access and utilize the data than ever before, especially compared with printed resources. Teachers may download lesson plans aimed at grades 6-12 through the Resources tab in the upper-right menu bar. A statement in this section indicates that these resources are being updated to reflect the most current version of the database, and lists contact information should teachers need further assistance in using the site as a classroom resource.[i]
In summary, this digital history project is an incredible scholarly resource created and maintained by multinational historians and researchers, and should be a valuable resource to history teachers, students, and the interested public. The site is free and easy to access and use: no downloads are required. In terms of content, the site presents honest and factual information about the slave trade and the effects of European colonization on world history that users can see in the form of digitized archival data transferred from hundreds of years of written records. According to Dr. David Eltis’ 2018 introduction to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, “the details of the more than 36,000 voyages presented here greatly facilitate the study of cultural, demographic, and economic change in the Atlantic world from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.”[ii] The site’s creators hope that scholars around the world will utilize the databases to analyze variables and trends in a way that was not possible before. Doing so may shed new light on a dark era of history that affects us so much today.
McClurken, Jeffrey. 2020. “Digital History Reviews.” Organization of American Historians. Accessed Feb. 22, 2020. https://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/.
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