Linking Datasets within and beyond the African Diaspora Consortium

The work of numerous scholars on issues in the history of the African Diaspora has led to development of a remarkable collection of datasets, large and small, based in many parts of the Americas and in Africa, with individual-level data on names, social categories, occupations, family histories, experiences such as slave runaways, and more. Scholars conducting such work have been meeting to consider how to combine and consolidate the results of their research.

This paper proposes two aspects of the next step in building an African Diaspora Consortium. First is the task of making these datasets consistent with each other; second is the task of linking these data to each other and to historical data on other topics. A collaboration is proposed, with work to be based especially at Michigan State University (working with the African Diaspora group) and the University of Pittsburgh (working on a global historical data resource), that will address these two tasks and their combination. MSU will focus first on creating consistent definition of specific data in participating datasets; Pitt will focus first on creating general metadata standards on time, space and topics, which can be incorporated into the MSU datasets. Pitt will pursue its development of techniques for linking and aggregating discrete datasets; MSU will be able to apply these techniques to linking African Diaspora data. For MSU, the benefits will be reliance on general standards for basic metadata, assistance in linking and aggregating datasets, and the ability to link African Diaspora data to other topics. For Pitt, the benefits will be experience in linking its global data resource and metadata system with a well-organized regional group. Such multi-level collaboration will lay additional groundwork for global social-science research.