Freedom on the Move

Client

Edward Baptist
Associate Professor, Department of History, Cornell University
<eeb36@cornell.edu>

Technical advisor

Jeremy Williams
Software Developer, Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research
<jw568@cornell.edu>

Summary

Throughout the 250-year history of slavery in North America, enslaved people tried to escape. Once newspapers were common, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate these fugitives. Such ads provide significant quantities of individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected. The Cornell Department of History, in collaboration with the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) and Cornell University Library (CUL), are designing and beginning data collection for a database that will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of data collection will be crowdsourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all levels, in multiple disciplines.

Technical Summary

The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database has been designed in PostgreSql and an instance of (Drupal based) Transcribr has been set up for transcribing ads. What is needed is a web application that will provide an interface for users to find specific fields from the text of these ads and record them into the FOTM database. Design of the interface will require some thought, as it must be a compelling and rewarding experience for the end user. Depending on the size of the team, the scope would include designing and implementing a web application as described above, and an API for querying the database. CISER servers are available for hosting the web application and database during development.

Technologies extensively used: PHP, JQuery/Javascript, PostgreSql, Drupal, HTML, CSS.

Opportunity and Challenge

The successful implementation of this technology will expand research on perhaps the most traumatic and profound events in the history of the United States. The challenge will be to create a user experience that will be engaging enough to facilitate the population of the data fields of interest, and to build infrastructure to expose this data for researchers.