Finding Runaway Slaves in Runaway Data

This presentation introduces the Brazilian Runaways Database (BRD), the first interregional and largest survey of runaways in Brazil, and discusses its relationship to archival material that is increasingly digital and searchable by keyword.  We argue that combining quantitative and qualitative details in the BRD gives new insight into slave action; the abuses they endured; and their perceived manners, appearance and identity – including gender and race.  We also explore the BRD’s relationship to perhaps more than a billion pages of archival documents from across the Atlantic World and mostly from newspaper sources that have been digitized, OCR processed and made available to historians for electronic keyword search.  Such a quantity of material presents opportunities both exciting and daunting; it is especially important for the study of slave and post-slave societies of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries because it may compensate for a deficit of self-created text by the enslaved and their descendants.  But improved power and ability by historians is matched by increased expectation by reviewers and readers.  Finally, we propose ways these data and new modes of access may lend themselves to other innovative tools of the digital humanities, such GIS, network analysis, and content analysis.