Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company

建立大西洋奴隶贸易的数字档案：解锁南海公司的记录

• 批准号: AH/W005514/1
• 负责人: Nicholas Radburn
• 金额: $ 25.88万
• 依托单位: Lancaster University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FW005514%2F1
• 关键词: Towards; Digital; Archive; Atlantic; Slave

Between 1500 and 1867, 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard slave ships and transported across the Atlantic Ocean; over half a million people who survived the Middle Passage undertook another seaborne 'Final Passage' within the Americas. These world-shaping forced migrations generated an immense quantity of archival material that is scattered across the globe and written in multiple languages. But accessing, understanding, and interpreting this material is presently difficult, especially for marginalized people who lack the resources to reach archives in Europe and North America.This project aims to democratize access to the archives of the Atlantic slave trades by employing innovative digital methods. It will create the Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades (DAAST) an open-access digital resource that will enable users to access enormous quantities of manuscript material drawn from libraries around the world. Those records will be made comprehensible by using handwritten text recognition and machine translation technologies. Research description framework approaches will enable archival materials to be semantically linked, and tied to Slave Voyages (SV), a powerful dataset of the Atlantic slave trades. The DAAST will consequently enable users to comprehend how the trade operated; the experiences of its victims; and the motivations of its perpetrators, while simultaneously grasping the trade's size, complexity, and duration. This project lays DAAST's foundations through a focus on Britain's South Sea Company (SSC)-one of the largest slaving entities in history. Founded in London in 1711, the SSC was soon after granted the asiento, the exclusive right to carry enslaved people to the Spanish Americas. Between 1713 and 1739, the SSC dragged forty-two thousand captives from Africa to the Americas; it shifted a further forty-eight thousand people from the British Caribbean to the Spanish Americas. Because of the SSC's key role in both trades, its voluminous records- which are distributed through archives in the United Kingdom, the US, and Spain-shed uniquely detailed light on the operation of the slave trade across the vastness of the Atlantic World. In addition to enhancing efforts to research the slave trades' history, this project promises to have broader impacts on both slave trade studies and the Digital Humanities. By creating a new platform for making the archives of the slave trade accessible and comprehensible, this project will generate a resource that will grow exponentially and underpin generations of new scholarship. Researchers in other fields grappling with the challenges of making archival material available and comprehensible will also benefit by utilizing the methodologies pioneered through this project. Cultural institutions will be also be furnished with a powerful model that they can emulate as they seek to decolonize their collections by making them accessible to a global public via digital methods.

在1500年至1867年期间，1250万非洲人被迫登上奴隶船，穿越大西洋;超过50万中间通道幸存者在美洲进行了另一次海上“最后通道”。这些塑造世界的被迫迁移产生了大量的档案材料，这些材料分散在地球仪各地，并以多种语言编写。但是，目前访问，理解和解释这些材料是困难的，特别是对那些缺乏资源访问欧洲和北美档案的边缘化人群。该项目旨在通过采用创新的数字方法，使大西洋奴隶贸易档案的访问民主化。它将创建大西洋奴隶贸易数字档案（DAAST），这是一个开放式数字资源，使用户能够访问来自世界各地图书馆的大量手稿材料。这些记录将通过使用手写文本识别和机器翻译技术变得易于理解。研究描述框架方法将使档案材料语义链接，并绑定到奴隶航行（SV），一个强大的数据集的大西洋奴隶贸易。因此，DAAST将使用户能够理解交易如何运作;受害者的经历;以及犯罪者的动机，同时掌握交易的规模，复杂性和持续时间。该项目通过关注英国南海公司（SSC）-历史上最大的奴役实体之一-奠定了DAAST的基础。SSC于1711年在伦敦成立，不久后被授予asiento，将奴隶运送到西班牙美洲的独家权利。1713年至1739年间，SSC将4.2万名俘虏从非洲拖到美洲;又将4.8万人从英属加勒比海转移到西班牙美洲。由于SSC在这两种贸易中的关键作用，其大量记录-通过英国，美国和西班牙的档案分发-为横跨大西洋世界的奴隶贸易提供了独特的详细信息。除了加强研究奴隶贸易历史的努力外，该项目还有望对奴隶贸易研究和数字人文学科产生更广泛的影响。通过创建一个新的平台，使贩卖奴隶的档案可以查阅和理解，该项目将产生一种将成倍增长的资源，并为几代人的新学术奠定基础。其他领域的研究人员正在努力应对提供和理解档案材料的挑战，他们也将受益于利用通过这一项目开创的方法。文化机构也将获得一个强大的模式，供它们在寻求通过数字方式向全球公众提供其收藏品以实现非殖民化时效仿。