Methodology
Compiling the Data: Gathering
One of the first academic and systematic attempts to accurately calculate the number of enslaved African crossing the Atlantic was by Philip Curtin. His 1969 The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census detailed the statistics of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the best of his professional ability from the sources that were available to him during his era. Moving forward, progressive historians have access to tools or databases that make the assumptions and estimations made by past inquiries seem like shots in the dark. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database originated in the late 90’s and early 2000’s with the intent of allowing users access to massive amounts of information, accurate statics and detailed sources about the slave trade. Our group’s mission is to utilize “data-scraping” to collect large amounts of select information and statistics that is provided throughout the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to help form new ideas or offer a better understanding of the trends that existed.
The information that Dr. Curtin analyzed in The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census can also be found inside the Trans-Atlantic Database, but the addition of several decades of independent and collaborative research makes it a source unlike any other with how much information and cross referencing he makes across archives. The Trans-Atlantic Database is a collective of records, censuses and other confirmed documentation that provides accurate information on the topic of slavery without some of the biases that existed during past inquiries a few decades ago. The Voyages website itself is the product of a experimental digitization of history developed by a multi-disciplinary team consisting of; historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers. They built the database while working in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America. The variety of approaches and the multitude of sources offered by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages make it the ideal candidate for our Digital Humanities: Hacking History Project and help discover a better scope of the slave trade over four centuries.
Compiling the Data: Reporting
The process of putting the data together was actually extremely simple after the search was complete. We compiled the results of our scrape into a fairly hefty .csv file that we picked over to eliminate incomplete manifests or logs that didn't have a defined port of origin or amount of slaves onboard. We will have the file available in our data section.