Welcome
We hope this finds you and your communities well. In this brief newsletter we launch a new project and share Georeferencer news…
Launching today! Agents of Enslavement? Colonial newspapers in the Caribbean and hidden genealogies of the enslaved
Agents of Enslavement? is a research project which explores the ways in which colonial newspapers in the Caribbean facilitated and challenged the practice of slavery. One of the goals of this project is to create a database of enslaved people identified within these newspapers. This should be of benefit to people researching their family history as well as to people who simply want to understand more about the lives of enslaved people and their acts of resistance.
It also seeks to identify the networks and voices of enslaved people hidden within these newspapers. These crowdsourcing tasks are integral to both these aims as your help will create new datasets for analysis.
Take part: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/gjevon/agents-of-enslavement
This project is run by the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), which funds the digitisation of endangered archival material around the world. EAP is funded by Arcadia and administered by a small team at the British Library. It's led by Dr Graham Jevon of the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) who has been appointed as a British Library Coleridge Fellow for 2021. Look for news on the EAP blog or follow @BL_EAP or @LibCrowds on twitter for updates.
You can also learn more about the project in this Guardian article, Secrets of rebel slaves in Barbados will finally be revealed.
New items in Georeferencer
Dr. Gethin Rees writes, I’m delighted that 1,277 maps from our War Office Archive have been added to the Georeferencer in mid-July. These military intelligence maps relate to Eastern Africa, particularly modern-day Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Somaliland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and parts of South Africa. The British Library has catalogued, conserved and digitised the archive with generous funding from the Indigo Trust. Links to resources about these maps are available from this blog post: https://blogs.bl.uk/magnificentmaps/2021/07/im-delighted-that-1277-maps-from-our-war-office-archive-have-been-added-to-the-georeferencer-in-the-last-few-days-these.html
We now have 63902 maps georeferenced on the platform which is an amazing achievement. An exciting new project, ‘Machines Reading Maps’ [https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/machines-reading-maps] based at the Alan Turing Institute is also now using our georeferenced Goad fire insurance maps. Thanks to all those who contributed to their georeferencing - they have been used by several research projects and are an invaluable resource.
We'd love you to suggest example projects, case studies, blog posts and publications that would strengthen the book. You can comment on specific text, or on a document as a whole. You'll need to create a free pubpub account to do this. We've also posted about why we're asking for 'peer review' from our community, and what we hope it might yield. The review period for this publication will close on August 9, 2021 so please do share your thoughts on https://britishlibrary.pubpub.org/ before then.
With best wishes,
Mia
For crowdsourcing projects at the British Library
Dr. Mia Ridge
Digital Curator, British Library
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