The time to formulate a new model for slavery’s data is now. Here’s why.
Right now, turning information from archival records into data is an extremely labor-intensive task, one done manually, one record at a time.
With the assistance of artificial intelligence, however, OCR will soon be able to do much of this work for us. In some ways, this is a good thing, because more and more information from slavery’s archive will become accessible as searchable data. Indeed, this is is work the Turner-Hines-Franklin Institute is positioned to lead.
In other ways, however, the possibility that we will soon be able to generate data from slavery’s archive all but automatically is cause for concern.
Why?
Because right now, most of slavery’s data can be classified as fitting within one of two models.
The Standard Scholarly Model for Slavery’s Data
The standard scholarly model for slavery’s data provides free, open-access information about enslaved ancestors. However, many projects imagine descendants of enslaved ancestors as merely incidental beneficiaries of scholars’ expertise, not collaborative partners or ethical stakeholders. The standard scholarly model thus fails to recognize and/or repair the violent alienation from kin and community inflicted upon the enslaved by slavery’s original archive.
The Genealogical Megasite Model for Slavery’s Data
By making users pay--in one way or another--to access information about enslaved people, genealogical megasites effectively re-commoditize enslaved ancestors who were, after all, commoditized in life. Ancestry.com, for example, extracts a monetary price, while FamilySearch requires users to pay an in-person visit to a FamilySearch Affiliate Library or official FamilySearch Center (located inside Mormon churches) in order to access many records from slavery.