Researchers unlock digital archive of enslaved people's own words
A new open-access dataset brings together narratives written and spoken by formerly enslaved people from 1795 to the 1930s—giving researchers direct access to first-person historical accounts. The collection could reshape how institutions, archives, and educational programs tell stories of American and Caribbean history, with implications for how organizations approach historical documentation and community engagement.
Originaltitel: Voices of formerly enslaved: A new text corpus of narratives by formerly enslaved persons
These data consist of newly OCRed and annotated narratives, both autobiographical texts written by, and interviews with, formerly enslaved persons of African descent in the United States of America and the Caribbean, including extensive time-related and geographical metadata. The texts authored by these individuals span from the years 1795 to approximately 1900, while the interviews were conducted in the 1930s. The former are written in standardised English from that time, whereas the latter often are written down in mediated, vernacular form, causing issues in lemmatisation and part-of-speech tagging. The aim is to create openly accessible corpora that can be utilised for the purpose of researching how these formerly enslaved persons described their own lives.