MATRIX is honored to host Enslaved.org’s Summer Institute for College & University Faculty in 2023, funded by a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The institute explores the opportunities and challenges of engaging in data-informed humanistic research and public scholarship as it applies to the study of enslaved people of African descent.
The research team at Enslaved.org is excited about this NEH institute because it embraces the opportunity to share what it has learned from engagement with the project while learning from others with experiences at an array of institutions of higher education and expertise in a range of disciplinary approaches to the humanities. Enslaved.org is not the only data-informed, Internet-based project exploring the lives of enslaved people of African descent. There are many others including and not limited to SlaveVoyages, Slave Societies Digital Archive, Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery, Legacies of British Slavery, and Freedom on the Move. At the workshop, we will explore these and other projects and have principal investigators from a variety of research teams available to share their expertise and experiences. In addition, the workshop will feature leading scholars who study the history of slavery, public historians who engage with slavery in museums and at sites of memory, archivists who are responsible for preserving and cataloging digital materials, genealogical researchers who serve an audience professional historians don't always consider, and data scientists, website designers, and programmers who are indispensable to data-informed, Internet-based history projects.
Enslaved.org Co-PI Walter Hawthorne and Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation managing editor Kristina Poznan serve as the Institute Directors. Other faculty include Enslaved.org co-PIs Dean Reherger and Daryle Williams, as well as Catherine Foley, Sharon Leon, Gregory O’Malley, Nakia Parker, Alicia Sheill, and Marshanda Smith.
