Looking for Data in All the Right Places: Recreating the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon
Author(s): Molly H Kerr; Esther White
Year: 2016
Summary
At his death in 1799, George Washington recorded 318 enslaved people at Mount Vernon. This number does not reflect the numbers of individuals who worked the property during the entire tenure of the Washington family from 1735 – 1858, and it does not begin to address individuals enslaved on the numerous properties owned by Washington or the vast acreage he administered on behalf of the Custis family. To better understand the lives of all those enslaved individuals, Mount Vernon’s digital humanities program designed a unique database to capture the events of their daily lives. This database is successfully compiling, deduping, and organizing references from ledgers, diaries, work reports, etc., to provide a means to quantitatively analyze these textual references. This paper explores the overall Slavery Database and focuses on issues of data entry, data manipulation, and the complexity of working with text as data.
Cite this Record
Looking for Data in All the Right Places: Recreating the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. Molly H Kerr, Esther White. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434421)
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Keywords
General
Digital Data
•
enslaved community
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prosopography
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
18th Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 826