African Biographies from the Era of the Slave Trade: Methods and Problems

Most of the slave trade-related databases of recent years have been quantitative in emphasis, leading to calls to “humanize” the field.  The SHADD Biographies Project represents an effort to do just that by collecting, transcribing, and making available approximately 1,000 narratives and testimonies by Africans from the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, along with biographical data on 100,000 more.  By their nature, however, databases privilege information that is discrete and quantifiable over information that is more qualitative and subjective.  This paper will discuss the problems posed in translating subjective testimonies into data.  How, for example, should historians treat such complex issues as language and identity?  How should they deal with the contradictory or even misleading statements in the source material?  Is it possible to pose quantitative questions to a database built on subjective testimony?