Profs and Pints Online presents: “Encountering the Enslaved,” a look behind the data at Enslaved.org, a groundbreaking effort to bring to light the lives of individuals in the transatlantic slave trade, with Daryle Williams, history professor at the University of Maryland and co-principal investigator for this open-source database project.

[ This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access. ]

Until recently, much of the data on the transatlantic slave trade has been statistical, offering fairly little information about the individual people who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading. That promises to change profoundly as a result of Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org), an online data portal accessible to both scholars and the public at large.

Launched in 2020 after being developed by a long list of leading scholars of slavery, Enslaved.org collects information from various archives into an online portal so that fragments of information on people can be assembled into fuller portraits of them. It already makes available nearly half a million records—from mini-biographies to downloadable spreadsheets—and it promises to grow rapidly.

Come learn about this ambitious research effort and how you can use it for your own research from Daryle Williams, a veteran scholar of slavery and one of the project’s leaders.

Dr. Williams will describe how the project brings together digital humanities and data sciences to build upon three decades of data-driven approaches to the history of the transatlantic slave trade and Atlantic slave societies. He’ll take us on a quick tour of the origins and objectives of Enslaved.org, discuss the challenges of understanding enslavement through the lens of the named individual appearing in a dataset, and share some of the insights that the project already has yielded.

Drawing from his own research focused on 19th-century Brazilian slave society, he’ll illustrate what we can learn from such research by telling us the fascinating story of Maria Angola, a mother who fought to wrest her son from illegal enslavement, and about the curious life of João Congo, the “Peg-Leg Runaway.”

You might end up eager to embark on your own research about individuals, families, and communities under slavery. This talk will tell you how to get started.

Profs & Pints Online: Encountering the Enslaved