SlaveVoyages: Review

Reviewers: Kevin Pham

Review Began: 14 March 2022

Review Ended: 16 March 2022

Project links: https://www.slavevoyages.org/

Data and Sources

• Published slave-trading voyage records
• Documentary sources
• Court records that include slave names

Processes

• Standardizing existing data into precise variables (data variables and imputed variables) and organizational format (voyage-based data as opposed to ship-based data)
• Collating voyages that appeared in several different sets (converting single-source data sets into multisource equivalents, and checking on the validity of old compilations)
• Adding new (largely unpublished) information

Presentation

• At a high level the site is thoroughly organized in tab format—whether navigating between the databases (and the sites about/contact page) or within the databases themselves
• The project has three key databases: Transatlantic voyages, and Intra-American voyages, and “People of the Atlantic Slave trade”
• The voyage databases include data filters and 8 different modes of presentation: Results, Summary, statistics, Tables, Data visualization, Timeline, Maps, Timelapse.
• The “People of the Atlantic Slave trade” is organized in table format

Digital Tools Used to Build It

• No mention of specific tools besides the fact the project is powered by Oracle Research product(s)

Languages

English, Spanish, Portuguese

Review

The SlaveVoyages project is a multi-source dataset and open-access, interactive website that employs information visualization techniques to illustrate Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade voyages over time. Grounded in disparate records and datasets tracking these voyages, the project grew out of an international effort to organize this information into a single, multi-source dataset that can account for issues of double-counting and underrepresentation (of particular regions). From 2002 to 2005, the project focused its efforts on Portuguese and Spanish language archives around the Atlantic basins to account for a deficiency of accessible Latin-American expedition data. This three-year effort was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the United Kingdom, and administered by historians David Richardson and David Eltis as the principal investigators. Then, following a major grant to scholars at Emory University from the National Endowment for the Humanities and additional funding from W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, the project re-focused on presentation; this lead to the production of the open-access website and its launch in 2008. Additional funding following its launch allowed for the project to not only revamp its site but additionally introduce the Intra-American Slave Trade database (in addition to its Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database). The team over time has been composed of a multi-disciplinary mix of slave-trade scholars, historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers.

As noted above, the project’s key offerings are the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database and the Intra-American Slave Trade database. Both databases are accompanied by an “Understanding the Database” page (which generally includes information on the database’s history, variables, technical methods employed, and sources), essays (mostly historiographical explanations of the respective slave trade and any relevant contexts), and downloads (links to download the dataset in various formats). Because the Trans-Atlantic database has been worked on longer than the Intra-American one, the former also includes additional sections for introductory maps; 3D videos of slaving ships; and a timeline/chronology.

The databases themselves can be viewed in different formats. In addition to the “Results” format (a standard, comprehensive table of voyages), the database can be accessed through a summary of statistics, and a customizable table (such that the user can change out the type of variable in the table’s rows, columns, and cells express), data visualizations (an X-Y plot, bar chart, and donut chart), a timeline, a clickable map, and a timelapse feature. Both databases are highly interactive due in part to the sheer number of variables that the project provides, allowing for granular data exploration. Functionally, the database and the website itself are well-organized, and designed in a way that is intuitive and familiar (i.e. top navigation tabs for each database and its accompanying pages; horizontal tabs for database filters and formats; etc.). Text-heavy pages, such as the essays, are separate from the database and the visualizations, making the user experience focused and controlled. Overall, the project is clearly well-maintained and precise, and it shows not only in how thorough the data has been collected and processed but also through the project’s ability to include text-heavy pieces that contextualize the data into an in-depth understanding of the slave trade. For me, mobilizing the database with these pieces provide insight into how the slave trade looked over time across contexts; and more importantly, it illustrates how historical developments conditioned by the slave trades in question materialize the very data being collected by the project’s investigators.

Lastly, the project also includes a “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” database, which is divided into two sub-databases, “African Names” and “Ocean Kinfolk.” The former provides personal details of 93,605 Africans taken from either captured slave ships or African trading sites, while the latter details 63,000+ enslaved African Americans transported to New Orleans from various US ports in the 19th century. Both databases detail each slave’s African name, age, gender, and places of embarkation and disembarkation. These databases are less flashy from a data perspective, in that both just include comprehensive tables. Nonetheless, like the databases outlined above, both of these databases include an “Understanding the Database” page that detail the origins of the data. As it concerns the “African Names” database, the essay notes that the data is collected directly from court papers around the Atlantic basins during the last 60 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which record the details of captives on two thousand vessels “condemned” for the engaging in the traffic. And as it concerns the “Ocean Kinfolk” database, the "Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves" enacted by US Congress in 1807, which outlawed the nation’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade and in its enactment also required any captain of a coastwise vessel with enslaved people onboard to file a manifest listing those individuals by name with the collector. The attention to context is again apparent and helpful in highlighting the interconnection between law and the conditions of possibility for data collection in the present.

With all this being said, to the non-historian eye, the goal of the database beyond empirical knowledge in and of itself might feel murky. The databases are exceedingly thorough and the long-form essays are informational, but as with much of slavery historiography in general, the ethical or political potential of the project is unstated—or perhaps assumed. Indeed, reading between the lines, the very (late) addition of the “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” and the emphasis on “names” bespeaks an affinity to contemporary calls for liberal “inclusion” within and outside academia; these calls themselves, of course, conditioned by entangled social movements (“Say Her Name”, “Black Lives Matter”) and their gradual transformation into political symbols. Additionally, the assumptions imminent to the historiographical method are apparent, relatedly, at the level of language, seen especially in the databases’ respective essays.

For example, in an essay accompanying the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database—“A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade” (2007)—Eltis writes: “If demand for slave-grown produce, social identity, and the Atlantic environment were three key factors shaping the traffic, the agency of Africans comprised a fourth major influence,” insofar as both African traders and “the victims of the slave trade” had major impacts on the slave trade; the latter in particular is noted in relation to slave rebellions that deterred trade in particular African regions. The invocation of the slave rebellions do little more than simply insinuate that Africans were “humans”, and that this definition of “human” is attributed to the ownership of “agency.” However, as Saidiya Hartman explicates in her influential Scenes of Subjection (1997), the very ideas of “agency” and “freedom”—and the modern recourse to the terms—are inextricable from legal re-workings of subjectivity in the so-called abolition of slavery, that rewrite the subject according to anti-black notions of property and possession that undergird the fungibility of the slave. It is for this reason that the very legal abolition of slavery engenders “[anti-black] forms of violence and domination enabled by the recognition of humanity, licensed by the invocation of rights, and justified on the grounds of liberty and freedom” (6). This sort of critical analysis is not possible simply by gaining access to the data presented. Taking this seriously, we might do well to rethink the concepts assumed by SlaveVoyages—which in turn might complicate the various “variables” extracted in data-fication.