Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: forms of resistance, ritual, kinship, and survival.The historical record that bears witness to these lives is scattered-geographically dispersed, archivally fragmented, and digitally siloed.The traces of individuals often exist as mere shadows: a name in a baptismal registry, a notation in a ship manifest, a mention in a planter's ledger, a deposition in a colonial court.These documents, while scattered across continents and disciplines, gesture toward one another-but too often speak in isolation.Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade confronts this problem directly.Through an ontology-based approach to data organization, it seeks not only to systematize knowledge of the historical records of enslavement, but to restore connective tissue between dismembered lives and histories.This is more than a technical endeavor; it is an ethical one.Each name, record, fragment is treated not as a data point but as the trace of a full human life-a person whose agency was never wholly extinguished.The ontology functions as both a scaffolding for the integration of disparate archival materials and as a principled commitment to historical justice.By bringing scattered records into structured relation, we begin the work of reassembling stories often left out of histories.1 I. Why Linked Data and a Modular OntologyImagine trying to trace a single enslaved person's life story using scattered digital archives.You might find "Maria Angola" baptized in a Rio de Janeiro church record, "Maria" listed as a seamstress in a plantation inventory from Bahia, and "Maria Angola" mentioned in a manumission document from São Paulo.Are these the same person?Traditional databases cannot tell you; each institution stores its records separately, using different naming conventions, different categories, even different spellings of the same name.Linked data works differently.Instead of trapping information in isolated databases, it creates connections across collections, allowing "Maria Angola" in Rio to link to "Maria" in Bahia if the evidence supports it.Think of it as building bridges between islands of information, enabling researchers to follow individual lives across the fragmentary historical record in ways that were previously impossible.Yet bridges need blueprints.When one archive calls someone a "seamstress" and another calls the same person a "costureira," how does the computer know they mean the same thing?When one database records "baptism" and another "batismo," how do we connect these related events?An ontology serves as a shared vocabulary-a translator that helps different databases understand each other.It defines not just what terms mean, but how they relate to one another: that baptisms are religious ceremonies, that seamstresses perform skilled labor, that a person can have multiple names across different documents.
Authors: Cogan Shimizu, Pascal Hitzler
Institutions: Wright State University, Kansas State University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7130504651
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