Content warning

The nature of the project means that much of the content you encounter during the tasks may be disturbing or upsetting.

The adverts and notices that contributors are asked to identify relate to human enslavement. They contain terms which are now considered discriminatory, harmful or offensive. They also contain graphic descriptions of how enslaved people were mistreated. The way these newspapers normalise this practice can be particularly shocking.

Please take care while working on this project and take a break or stop if it becomes upsetting.

Coping with exposure to disturbing or upsetting material

The British Red Cross Psychological and Mental Health team has produced a guide on 'Coping with Exposure to Disturbing Imagery'. Suggestions in this guide, which are also relevant to upsetting descriptions, include:

• Preparing yourself for unexpected emotions.
• Using grounding techniques such as focused breathing and squeezing your fingers.
• Talking about what you have seen with others (as well as talking to people and groups close to you, we also have the talk boards where you can discuss things with myself and other Zooniverse contributors).
• Avoiding further exposure (take regular breaks and feel free to stop working on the project and move onto one of Zooniverse's other great projects).

About the project

Full Project title

Agents of Enslavement Colonial newspapers in the Caribbean and hidden genealogies of the enslaved.

Project funding

The actuation of this research project is thanks to the British Library's Coleridge Fellowship, which has been awarded to Dr Graham Jevon of the Endangered Archives Programme. The crowdsourcing tasks will be complemented by the creation of OCR (optical character recognition) data (in other words, computerised transcription of the printed text). The creation of OCR data is thanks to funding support from the Eccles Centre for American Studies and the technical skills of Find My Past.

Aims

The aim of this project is to research the ways in which newspapers facilitated and challenged the practice of slavery. To that end, this initial case study will focus on two colonial newspapers published in Barbados:

• The Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette (1783-1848)
• The Barbadian (1822-1861)

A subsidiary objective of this project is to create a database of enslaved people identified within these newspapers and to foreground the voices of enslaved people hidden within these newspapers.

Your help

We need your help to identify, categorise, and transcribe different types of advertisements and notices. This will help create datasets for analysis. These datasets will also be made freely available and will hopefully help genealogists as well as academic researchers.

Over the coming months we will launch a series of different tasks.

Current task

In the first task, we need help to identify four types of slavery related advertisements and notices:

1. Enslaved people advertised for sale or hire
2. Wanted adverts posted by enslavers looking to purchase or hire enslaved people
3. Adverts seeking the recapture of freedom seekers [enslaved people that have escaped / "runaway"]
4. Adverts notifying enslavers that they can collect enslaved people that have been captured.

Future tasks

• A follow up task will ask contributors to transcribe key information from the adverts and notices identified in the first task, such as names, ages, and connections of enslaved people.
• Another task will present users with individual articles and ask them to label it as either pro-slavery or anti-slavery. This will help us to assess the extent to which newspapers provided a platform to challenge as well as facilitate enslavement.

Positive significance of these tasks

An unfortunate aspect of this project, particularly the first task to identify adverts and notices relating to slavery, is that you may feel like you are simply highlighting the voices of enslavers. But one of the positive outcomes of this task is that this method can foreground the hidden voices of people who were enslaved.

The 'runaway' adverts which sought the recapture of enslaved people who had escaped are particularly illustrative of this positive turnaround. These adverts contain rich detail about individual people, including their names, ages, and family networks. This level of detail represents the interests of the enslaver who wanted to increase the chances of capturing the freedom seeker. But it also reflects the actions of the enslaved. The publication of these adverts, and the stories they reveal, were created by the enslaver, but born out acts of resistance. Every advert designed to recapture someone represents a person who has fought for freedom.

By highlighting these adverts, we are able to foreground and examine these acts of resistance. We are also able to create a database of people, to map family and resistance networks. And this has the additional benefit of being an invaluable resource for family historians to trace their ancestors.

Example questions these datasets will help us answer

• Were slavery related advertisements more prevalent in one or other newspaper?
• Did particular types of advertisement become more or less frequent over time?
• Can fluctuations be linked to historical events? For example, did particular revolts or changes in the law lead to an increase or decrease in a particular type of advertisement?

The research material and digitisation acknowledgements

The two newspaper titles involved in this case study were digitised by project teams led by Ingrid Thompson, chief archivist at the Barbados Archives Department, and Amalia Levi, the founder and chair of the HeritEdge Connection. Both these digitsation projects were funded by the Endangered Archives Programme. In recognising the potential of the sustained resistance strategies of the people in the fugitive slave ads, Dr Lissa Paul initiated and served as an advocate for the digitisation projects funded by the EAP grant.

You can read more about the original projects to digitise the Barbados Mercury in an article by Amalia Levi and Tara Inniss and in a blog post by Amalia Levi.

The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP)

The Endangered Archives Programme funds the digitisation of endangered archival material all around the world. EAP is funded by Arcadia (a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin) and it is administered by a small team at the British Library.

Archives digitised by EAP project teams, including these two newspaper collections, are made freely available online via eap.bl.uk.

In the news

The launch of the project was covered in the UK national paper the Observer.

You can read more about the project in our launch blog.

Follow our progress

You can keep up-to-date with the general work of EAP by following us on Twitter @bl_eap and/or by signing up for our quarterly e-newsletter.

We will follow the talk page and you can also get in touch with us via the messages option.

We will also update the results page here, as the project goes through its various stages of completion.