Digital History, Slave Databases, and Mapping
Session Abstract
There is a significant need for such a collaborative research site about Atlantic slavery. During the past two decades, there has been a seismic change in perception about what we can know about African slaves and their descendants throughout the Atlantic World (Africa, Europe, North and South America). Scholars have realized that, far from being either non-existent or extremely scarce, various types of documentation about African slaves and their descendants throughout the Atlantic abound in archives, courthouses, churches, government offices, museums, ports, and private collections spread throughout the Atlantic World. Since the 1980s, scholars have been compiling data from such collections into large databases, running statistical analyses and making their databases available to the public on CDrom and, now, the World Wide Web. Some working with such databases are examining innovative ways to visualize findings so as to make them more understandable. There is much truth in the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” To that we’d add “an interactive map is worth a one-hundred thousand pictures in a book.”