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

在1500至1867年间，1250万非洲人被迫登上奴隶船只，被运送到大西洋彼岸；在中途航道幸存下来的50多万人在美洲境内进行了另一次海上“最后航道”。这些塑造世界的强迫移民产生了大量分散在全球各地并以多种语言书写的档案材料。但目前获取、理解和解释这些材料是困难的，特别是对于缺乏资源接触欧洲和北美档案馆的边缘人来说。该项目旨在通过使用创新的数字方法使获取大西洋奴隶贸易档案的工作民主化。它将创建大西洋奴隶贸易数字档案馆(DAAST)，这是一个开放获取的数字资源，使用户能够获取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而变得可理解。研究描述框架方法将使档案材料能够在语义上链接，并与大西洋奴隶贸易的一个强大的数据集--奴隶航行(SV)捆绑在一起。因此，DAAST将使用户能够了解交易是如何运作的；受害者的经历；以及肇事者的动机，同时掌握交易的规模、复杂性和持续时间。这个项目通过关注英国南海公司(SSC)-历史上最大的奴隶制实体之一-奠定了DAAST的基础。SSC于1711年在伦敦成立，不久后被授予Asiento，即将被奴役的人运送到西班牙美洲的独家权利。1713年至1739年间，南大西洋公约将4.2万名俘虏从非洲转移到美洲；又将4.8万人从英属加勒比海转移到美洲西班牙。由于SSC在这两个贸易中扮演着关键角色，其大量记录-通过英国、美国和西班牙的档案分发-提供了横跨广袤的大西洋世界的奴隶贸易运作的独特详细信息。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产生更广泛的影响。通过创建一个新的平台，使奴隶贸易档案变得可访问和可理解，该项目将产生一个资源，该资源将呈指数级增长，并为新的学术研究奠定基础。其他领域的研究人员努力应对提供和理解档案材料的挑战，也将受益于通过该项目开创的方法论。文化机构还将被提供一个强大的模式，它们可以效仿，因为它们寻求通过数字方法向全球公众提供藏品的非殖民化。

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.