Mapping Mobility in Slavery and Freedom: The Ethical Issues and Methodological Process of Datafying Slavery's Archive

Historians are increasingly studying and digitizing runaway slave advertisements in the United States as evidence of resistance to slavery. Runaway advertisements were typically written by former enslavers in the American antebellum era to offer monetary rewards for the capture and return of enslaved people. These were essentially sources of terror used for the purposes of re-enslavement, yet historians can read them against the grain to uncover the fuller lives of these escaping individuals. Digital historians in particular can utilize these sources for mapping, text analysis, and social network analysis, and digital mapping is especially useful because runaway advertisements typically included geographic locations associated with the enslaver and escapee. Yet, these advertisements remain deeply embedded in bias and terror, so corroborating them with other primary sources such as autobiographies, slave narratives, and abolitionist newspaper articles can help to map out more complete journeys of people who escaped slavery in the antebellum U.S. This poster suggests the different ethical issues of datafying sources from slavery’s archive, demonstrates the digital process of quantifying varied sources to create a curated dataset, and uses spatial visualizations to provide new insights about mobility in both slavery and freedom.