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November 24, 2008
Slave trade data make digital debut

By ELAINE JUSTICE

A group of international scholars will gather at Emory Dec. 5-6 to celebrate the debut of “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” (www.slavevoyages.org) as it begins its own maiden expedition.

Two years in the making at Emory, the free and interactive Web-based resource documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, says David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History and one of the scholars who originally published “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” as a CD-ROM in 1999. He and Martin Halbert, director of digital innovations for Emory Libraries, directed the work that made the online “Voyages” project expandable, interactive and publicly accessible.

“‘Voyages’ provides searchable information on almost 35,000 trans-Atlantic voyages hauling human cargo, as well as maps, images and data on some individual Africans transported,” says Eltis.

The conference, which also marks the bicentennial of the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, will feature presentations by graduate students who have worked on the database, with leading scholars commenting on their papers. Other sessions include “The Slave Trade, the Web site and Atlantic History” and “The Slave Trade, the Website and the Classroom.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus and founding director emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, will give a keynote lecture on “Comparing the Paths to American and British Slave-Trade Abolition.” Following Davis’ talk will be the formal launch of the “Voyages” database by Rick Luce, director of University Libraries. The following day sees a series of workshops that will explore applications of the new resource for scholars, educators and the general public. For more information, visit www.ias.emory.edu/events/
SlaveTradeConference.pdf.

Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, “Voyages” is based on the seminal 1999 work, “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” That CD-ROM included more than 27,000 slave trade voyages and has been popular with scholars and genealogists alike. However, it is no longer available, and had several limitations.

“Everyone wants to know where their ancestors came from,” Eltis says. “There are more data on the slave trade than on the free migrant movement simply because the slave trade was a business and people were property, so records were likely to be better. What the database makes possible is the establishment of links between America and Africa in a way that already has been done by historians for Europeans.”

Adds Halbert: “The digital and Web-based Voyages publication is intentionally collaborative and can grow and change over time. Scholars who discover new information can add it to the database, and thus share it with their colleagues. In addition, researchers can download the database in a format compatible with the several statistical packages.”