DATAS Details
“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS/IASET)” develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, circa 1500-1867. The project centers on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. DATAS is a repository of biographical information on individuals who were forced into slavery. As a platform, DATAS provides access to available data on trans-Atlantic migration and identity.
DATAS is involved in the development of a method for analyzing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making and the types of queries used in our digital platform requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning trans-Atlantic Africans.
Our methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four important reasons. First, scholarly expertise on trans-Atlantic Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was rarely limited to one country or population and the transfer of people across borders has been part of the global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a Platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools and a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about data justice, research transparency and demography.
DATAS consists of a network of scholars centered in three countries: Canada, France and Britain, with participating scholars from a dozen countries.
