Cornell University in Ithaca, New York has begun a project to compile a database of historical runaway slave advertisements published in newspapers. The project involves digitizing, preserving, organizing, and enabling analysis of all surviving runaway ads.
Runaway slave ads were a common sight in North American newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries. They describe people as property, listing their physical attributes and family connections.
According to Cornell Chronicle, a university publication, “The project, Freedom on the Move, aims to compile all North American runaway slave advertisements, never before systematically collected, into a collaborative database of information. The project will include new tools allowing partner institutions to add their own archives, opening up unprecedented ways to engage a large online community and to study this traumatic but critical period in U.S. history.”
An estimated 100,000 or more runaway ads survive from the colonial and pre-civil war US. Information on the Freedom on the Move website says, “Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concentrated, and incredibly rare source of information about a population that is notably absent from most official historical records of the time.”
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing will enable the public to contribute to the database. Registered users can access the existing database on the website for research purposes and add to it.
“On entering the data-entry section of the website, users will see a PDF of the original ad and a ‘text’ field populated by an OCR (optical character recognition) engine. The user’s first task will be to ensure that the OCR version accurately matches up to the PDF version. They will be able to make any corrections necessary. Then, they will be prompted to record key information about the person in the ad, through a series of question-and-answers that sort key pieces of information into the database. Users will also have the opportunity to ‘tag’ database entries with information that they know, or that points to relevant information on the web—what our programmers call ‘rich semantic data.’ This tagging can happen during the data-entry process, or during later use of the database.”
Visit the Freedom on the Move website to learn more.