[Themaintainers] Maintaining SlaveVoyages.org

[Nina Lerman]

Thanks Lee!

For people unlikely to read this whole story, it's worth noting the longevity of maintenance on this project, a saga of all the steps in which maintenance so often doesn't happen:

"The data migrated from punch cards, to laptop computer, to a CD-ROM published in 1999, to a website that debuted at Emory in 2008. ... From 2015-2018, SlaveVoyages.org was completely re-coded and modernized…"

For the curious, if you scroll through you will find two bits of digi-hum "modernizing": an animated map of journeys and a digital reconstruction of a ship. The ship video page has a link to the corresponding database entry, for a quick view of the complexity of the database at this point (and of what it takes/will take to maintain it… one wonders what the next 10- or 20- year maintenance project will entail).

Nina

Nina E. Lerman
History Department
Whitman College
Walla Walla, WA 99362 USA
lermanne at whitman.edu

> On Mar 11, 2021, at 5:14 AM, lee vinsel <lee at themaintainers.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> A few years ago, I heard historian David Eltis talk about the database and website he had built, SlaveVoyages.org, which contains the records of more than 36,000 between Africa and the Americas. He was worried, perhaps even pessimistic, about the long-term maintenance of the database. As many Maintainers community members can tell us, the Digital Humanities is replete with tales of projects being built and then falling into disuse, disrepair, and ultimately dissolution. 
> 
> Well, when it comes to the SlaveVoyages database, at least, there is some good news. As a press release out of Emory University describes, a new consortium of 6 institutions has come together to preserve the database. Check it out here: https://news.emory.edu/features/2021/03/voyages-consortium/index.html
> 
> Lee
> 
> -- 
> Co-Director
> The Maintainers
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