By Briana Wipf
About six years ago, most of America became aware of Georgetown University’s history of slave ownership. The Jesuit institution sold 272 enslaved people in 1838 during financial difficulty, and media coverage explained that the university was now trying to track down descendants in order to pay reparations.
That story, says Sharon Leon, associate professor of digital humanities at Michigan State University, was new to the wider public at the time, but not to historians who have been studying the Jesuits’ ownership of enslaved people in Maryland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Leon would know because she is one of those historians, having begun her study of these enslaved people as an undergraduate at Georgetown University.
Leon presented her work on Thursday, Feb. 10, titled “From Scholar to System to Scale: Generating Meso-level Historical Data to Recover the Lived Experiences of Enslaved People,” before a hybrid audience at the University of Pittsburgh. The lecture was a presentation of the Bernadette Callery Archives Lecture Series and the Sara Fine Institute of the Pitt School of Computing and Information and co-sponsored by the Year of Data and Society.
Over more than a century, the Jesuits owned “a large number of enslaved people,” Leon explained. The plantations they owned “were run and maintained by slave labor all along.”
There was, for example, a blacksmith named Patrick Barnes, of the Bohemia plantation, who in 1792 decided to make plans to secure his and his family’s freedom. He asked the Jesuits to purchase his wife, Mary, and their children, Isaac and Hannah from their owner. The Jesuits did, paying £40 for the three of them.
In 1793, Barnes began making payments on his family, and by 1797 had purchased all their freedom (Barnes’ price was much more than the rest of his family because of his skills as a blacksmith). The Jesuits agreed to Barnes’ deal with the condition that he settle near Bohemia so they could continue to benefit from his services.
Stories like those of Patrick Barnes and his family are the ones that Leon wants to highlight in her research. She cares less about the Maryland Jesuits – other scholars have written about them anyway – and much more about the lives of the people who were enslaved by them.
With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leon began what would become Life and Labor under Slavery: the Jesuit Plantation Project. She found records of 1,144 enslaved people owned by the Jesuits between 1717 and 1838.
Leon’s project is far larger than the Jesuit Plantation Project, however (Leon adds “II” to this project, to differentiate it from the project she participated in as an undergraduate at Georgetown). As a digital humanist, Leon is also interested in creating “digital infrastructure to support creating new knowledge in the humanities.” In her project, that means creating linked open data infrastructure that allows for meso-level data, a type of data that “is derived, interpretive, [and] often related to entities outside the purview of cultural heritage collections.”
Such a data strategy, Leon argues, avoids the dehumanization that comes with traditional archival practices. Rather, Leon calls for a different type of archival description, and this is where meso-level data comes in.
This approach “brings users and visitors into collections in new ways,” Leon said.
Historians like her have spent countless hours in archives, amassing their own notes and building their own spreadsheets and data collections. But linking all that data together allows for a deeper and larger understanding of the lives of enslaved people in all their complexity.
The platform for this ambitious project is Omeka, for which Leon has served as director since 2012. Specifically, she is using the digital exhibit platform Omeka S, a system fundamentally tied to a linked open data framework.
With her own work on the Jesuit Plantation Project II and Omeka, Leon joined forces with other scholars and universities studying their own history of slave ownership, including Universities Studying Slavery. The result is On These Grounds: Slavery and the University, which aims to create a shared data model as well as an aggregation site for all these universities to share their own linked open data using archival records about their own institutions.
One of the goals of On These Grounds is “to surface this history in a way that pays deep attention to the humanity of these enslaved laborers,” Leon explained. Doing so means that “the institutions themselves can grapple with what they’ve done.”
With those ambitious goals in mind, though, the success of the project in some way hinges on vocabulary – vocabulary that is specific enough to usefully describe the lives of enslaved people but also broad enough to account for the plethora of human experience. One, Leon explained, is to change a person’s race from the “person” category to “event” category in order to track how racial language changes over time.
The shared data model for On These Grounds is being tested now, with revisions being made with help from an advisory board.