Research
"Perhaps resistance to the violence of slavery is survival, the will to survive, the sound of someone wanting to live or wanting to die. But the struggle against dehumanization is in the wanting. And sometimes, we can hear it." - Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive
About The Barbados Runaways Project
In the last year, the Barbados Mercury and Gazette was digitized with the help of the Endangered Archives Grant, forming a partnership between the British Library, Digital Library of the Caribbean (DLoC) and the Barbados National Archive. The Barbados National Archive then partnered with University of West Indies Cave Hill and the
Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) to form the Fugitive Caribbean Project.
Together, these groups joined in a collaborative effort to begin the process of combing through the periodicals for instances of runaway slave ads. Once these ads were located, they were captured and then transcribed. ln collaboration with teams in Barbados and in London at the New College of the Humanities, we have begun to think of ways that we might ask participants to respond, creatively, to the ads. We have decided that the Zooniverse platform was a great match as it allows users of all skill levels to help aid us in this project by transcribing ads, while also being able to review important, and often under-considered, parts of history.
This website is a chance for users to either choose to help with the transcription process, or to respond creatively to ads. By transcribing ads, users are directly contributing to the process of ingesting the ads into the ECDA's larger Early Caribbean archive. This process of transcription is especially important because it allows the ads to be registered on screen readers as well as allows for the text of the ads to become machine readable. Once the ads' text becomes readable by a computer, automated data analysis becomes possible. Additionally, through the transcription process, users are also prompted to contribute metadata such as runaway names, place names, and other informational details. This information is crucial to a large scale analysis of movement, place, and naming in Bajan runaway slave ads.
Alternatively, if users choose to respond creatively to the ads, they are directly contributing to the ways in which we can respond to and understand these ads in a contemporary context. As many users will find, by engaging with the ads creatively, the historical context of their creation is transformed and the runaway is given new life. By understanding and responding to runaway slave ads creatively, users have the opportunity to bring these historical texts into a contemporary context as well as contribute to research regarding the use of speculation in the archive.
The overall goal of the project is to engage contemporary readers with this particular periodical history. By doing so, our team hopes to be able to put the ads in conversation with each other and to think about the ways in which these ads paint a different picture of the realities of historical slavery in Barbados. This picture involves narratives of resistence as well as travel, trade, and familial bonds.