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08 November 2007

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, from Emory U.

http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/index.faces

Acc. to a blurb;
"Over 34,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1527 and 1866 that have been identified and verified to have actually occurred make up the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Records of the voyages have been found in multiple archival sources which are listed in a variable in the dataset.
These records provide details about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes.

The database enables users to search for information about a particular voyage or group of voyages and it provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, or on a timeline."


However, in Nov 2007 the system was far from being completed. The site was created in June 2006 by the Emory University Libraries, Atlanta, GA.

[...] The grants include $324,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and $25,000 from Harvard University's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research. The expansion of the current database is based on the seminal 1999 work The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, a CD-ROM that includes more than 27,000 slave trade voyages and has been popular with scholars and genealogists alike.

"We're trying to do for African Americans what's been done for Euro-Americans already," says David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History at Emory and one of the scholars who published The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Eltis and Martin Halbert, director of digital programs and systems for Emory's Libraries, are directing the project.
[...]

In addition to increasing the number of slave trade voyages from the original work by nearly 30 percent, the grant will allow the addition of new information to more than one-third of the voyages already included in the 1999 CD-ROM. The expanded database making its debut on the Internet will include auxiliary materials such as maps, ship logs, and manifests. [...]

Src: http://web.library.emory.edu/about/news/index.html


Please note that the above details were correct on the day this post was published. To suggest an update, please email the site's editor at tmciolek@ciolek.com