These artifacts possess value in various ways. They provide information that addresses gaps in our understanding of slavery and the experiences of Africans and Afro-descendant populations. They allow people living today to better understand the history of their families and communities. They testify, as well, to the relationship between written culture and oppression in New World societies.
Although such lists have served as sources for historical scholarship, they are seldom edited and transmitted as documents in their own right. Digital projects that address these documents most commonly extract the data they contain and reformat it as databases. This method avoids costs and complexities that can accompany editorial endeavors and may optimize the usability of the data in some contexts.
At the same time, such an approach presents at least two primary problems. The first involves access, as while the data can be queried and displayed, the sources themselves are often unavailable or can be consulted only as images, not as full text. The second deals with accuracy and interpretation, since when we remove the data from its discursive context, meaning is inevitably lost or distorted. In some instances, the extracted data may undergo modification or remediation that is not transparent to users.
This poster presentation examines a model for editing enumerations of enslaved persons in a way that allows them to be represented in their original format as linear texts and also as randomizable data. On the poster, I will first establish the problems outlined here and then illustrate via selections from document images and brief code snippets an approach to markup using TEI-XML that understands the documents in a dual fashion: as discursive texts and as collections of interoperable, manipulatable records. Using QR codes, I will also provide attendees access to examples of web interfaces that permit the texts to be displayed as digital transcriptions with document images and to be sorted, filtered, and queried on the basis of various factors.
Going beyond questions of access and context, my poster will conclude by briefly addressing the ethical problems in editing enumerations of people related to slavery—a topic of urgency given that these documents hold meaning for specific descendent communities living today. I consider how the dual linear and non-sequential approach described here can help us not only to respect the documents but also avoid perpetuating some of the discriminatory attitudes they embody. I reflect on how, through markup and interface design, we can not only avoid re-victimizing the people who appear in the lists, but also restore some of the dignity that the texts deny to them.