Historical Data at the Enslaved Conference

On March 8th and 9th, Michigan State University hosted a conference titled Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade. The conference brought together scholars using databases to research the lives of individuals connected to slavery and the slave trade. The list...

Transforming Historical Data into Visualizations

A central component of my CHI project is working with historical data. The creation of a database from historical documents is a long and tedious process, so I have decided to use one already available online. A group of economic historians published the African...

Africa’s Imperial Commodities

Europe’s exploitation of Africa is a common narrative in African history. Scholars continue to use archival records to investigate the movement of enslaved persons and commodities from Africa to the Americas and Europe. In the past ten years, scholars have also...

Data from the Atlantic Slave Trade, Part 2

In my last post, I discussed how historians use ethnonyms in historical datasets. The main take-away from that post is ethnonyms are difficult to interpret but can reflect the movement of African slaves with similar socio-cultural characteristics to specific regions...