EVENT DETAILS

Africa, the Diasporas and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Explorations in Digital History

Alex Borucki, Department of History, UCI
Daniel Domingues Department of History, University of Missouri Columbia.

The use of databases, Geographical Information Systems, sound recordings, and other digital tools have maximized the collaborative research, education, and outreach for African History and African Diaspora Studies in the past ten years. Launched in 2008, Voyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database hasinformation on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This website, www.slavevoyages.org, offers researchers, students and the general public a chance to rediscover the reality of one of the largest forced movements of peoples in world history. In this talk, Daniel Domingues and Alex Borucki will reflect about how Digital Humanities intersect with their own research and teaching on this subject. They will also exchange experiences on how Digital Humanities have impacted contemporary local communities shaped by the legacy of the slave trade, as well as how these communities made their own contributions to this scholarship.

Alex Borucki is Assistant Professor of History at UCI. He is the author of From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in Río de la Plata (forthcoming 2015). He has published articles in the American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review, Slavery & Abolition, and Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction.

Daniel Domingues is Assistant Professor of History at University of Missouri Columbia. He is currently working on a manuscript examining the issue of who Africans regarded as eligible for enslavement and sale into the transatlantic slave trade in West Central Africa. He has published articles in History in Africa, African Economic History, Slavery & Abolition, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and Revista Afro-Ásia.