Exciting new project -- Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network (ASDN) -- Can you help?



The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded the project, “Biographies: The Atlantic Slaves Data Network” (ASDN). The ASDN will provide a platform for researchers of African slaves in the Atlantic World to upload, analyze, visualize, and utilize data they have collected, and to link it to other datasets, which together will complement each other in such a way as to create a much richer resource than the individual datasets alone. To better understand the vision, do visit the project website.

MATRIX, Michigan State University’s digital humanities center, will create the ASDN website.  MATRIX is currently assessing the needs of the ASDN based upon Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s large dataset for Louisiana and Walter Hawthorne’s smaller dataset for Maranhão, Brazil.

But the more examples of datasets we have the better able we will be to define fields, to work through issues of combining data in different electronic formats, and to cope with other challenges we are bound to face. What we need now is additional scholars to share their database structures to help us create and set the parameters of the ASDN.

The project asks that if know scholars who have databases that might be helpful to the development of the ASDN that you contact the project?  The project promises that such “volunteered” databases will not be made public unless permission is granted.

Contacts for the project are:

Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall,

Walter Hawthorne

General Project Information

Editor’s Note: thanks to the Afrigeneas (digest) for letting us know about this exciting new project

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