Scholarly Review-Blog Post # 6

https://www.slavevoyages.org

https://news.emory.edu/features/2019/06/slave-voyages/index.html?fbclid=IwAR32uNkg2Ewtg1eDVu9B5F4Hey6oSoCkr_edV72TgYiCQ_yFv3-2I-Vomm0

I have a deep interest in African and African-American history of any kind. This really took root when I was an undergraduate student. My interests tended to focus around slavery when I was college and my first graduate program and now have shifted towards looking at convict leasing, and chain gangs in the south. I am in the beginning stages of a thesis and working on my proposal later this semester. My research will look at crime, punishment, and race in small town Florida in 1930. In our Digital Tools course, two weeks ago we viewed an extremely well put together website by Emory University that looks at slave voyages. This website uses a number of digital tools including a 3D-rendered slave ship shown in a video with narration, and time-lapse video, that maps the voyages of slaving vessels.

Within this year alone Emory University has added many new things to this page including this time-lapse video of transatlantic slave voyages, as well as the three-dimensionally rendered ship. This website also has a digitized names database, manuscripts, images, maps, and more. There is so much that this website has in store for a researcher, or just someone who is curious. In class, in part, the professor brought this website up as a tool to show us about the transatlantic slave trade because of a question I asked in class about how much mapping and quantification of transatlantic slave voyages had been done.

 Previously, I believed mapping and the quantification of data that uses the data of memories that have a profound sense of human suffering and struggle might lessen the humanity of these experiences even if there was no humanity in such an event or institution. Human memory and experience felt diminished to me with numbers, maps, and data. That was before I looked at this website. I can officially say, I have never before been moved nearly to tears over data and mapping tools, until seeing this data presented by Emory. It is something that needs to be shown in classrooms, as it shows students at all levels, the large scale of the transatlantic slave trade and where the slaves were sent from Africa. Data and mapping like this will give teachers and professors a visual tool to show just how large-scale the transatlantic slave trade was. This website also gives another fantastic tool for teaching, which is the video of a 3D-rendered slave ship with narration about the specific ship it is modeled after, the L’Aurore. This is an extremely useful tool because not everyone has access to a museum that has a model of a slave ship to show their students what it was like for the slaves onboard. Being able to show a class this video of the 3D slave ship is an amazing tool to show students. Pictures are also useful but data, mapping, and other digital tools have totally changed the world around us and have totally immersed us in the digital age.

Growing up in the 1990s, we never had access to information like this in school, and most mapping tools or digital tools for that matter were nonexistent for student or educational use probably until I was in middle school or even into high school. We are in a digital age now and given unprecedented access to information and tools that in the 1990s people would be amazed by. Slave Voyages by Emory University is an extremely well thought out and organized website. It is a researcher’s dream to be directed to a site like this by a professor and a phenomenal tool for students or educators of any kind, and anyone looking to learn more about slave voyages can find it here.