Creating a Visual Language of Marks
THE PROJECT
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a centuries-long trauma that saw approximately 12.5 million Africans forcibly taken from their homes and transported to work in the emerging plantation societies of the Americas. The trauma of enslavement and sustained repression of language, culture and beliefs blurred memories of origins and birthplaces. Previous attempts at analyzing large datasets of names recorded in manumission records to unearth individuals and personal histories have been challenged by practices of slave renaming.
Drs. Ladly and Keefer are working with their collaborators to develop a searchable visual database using the entries from the 19th century Registers of Liberated Africans to reveal individual identities and origins. Their research includes appropriate methods for collection, analysis and presentation of the sensitive personal information within these datasets. Kartikay Chadha (Project Manager & Researcher) assists the team with designing, developing and training an AI model to work in conjunction with ethno-linguistic and visual models, so that researchers and members of the public may extract meaningful information from the data. Working in the Visual Analytics Lab, the OCAD U design team is constructing computational architectures for the visual/linguistic database, developing a mathematical model for data analysis, and designing dynamic 2D and 3D visual models and user interfaces.
RESEARCH TEAM
Maria Yala
Research Assistant
Youssouf Traore
Research Assistant
Eric Lehman
Research Assistant
Michael McGill
Research Assistant
Thamires de Andrade
Research Assistant
OUR COLLABORATORS
- Dr. Paul Lovejoy, York University
- Dr. Dean Rehberger, Michigan State University
- Dr. Mohammed Salau, University of Mississippi
- Dr. Abubakar Babajo Sani, Umaru Musa Yar'adua University, Katsina
OUR PARTNER UNIVERSITIES
OUR FUNDING ORGANIZATIONS
CONTACT US
Dr. Martha Ladly
E: mladly@ocadu.ca
Dr. Katrina Keefer
E: katrinakeefer@trentu.ca
Kartikay Chadha
E: kchadha@faculty.ocadu.ca
Address:
Visual Analytics Labratory
OCAD University
Rm 720,205 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 1V3
IMAGE CREDITS
Background & Menu Images
About Section: “Enslaved Ethnic Groups, East Africa, Upper Nile Region, 1840s”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed October 9, 2019, Slavery Images
News Section: “Africa, late 18th cent.”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed October 9, 2019, Slavery Images
Splash Page, Research, and Portal Section: Photography by Kartikay Chadha, Project Manager & Researcher, Visual Analytics Lab, OCAD University. Photos taken during SSHRC supported resaerch in the Sierra Leone Public Archives, Freetown, Sierra Leone - Feburary 2019.
Model Section: “Nègres cangueiros. Différentes nations nègres” (Black porters and black people of different nations). Lithograph, coloured, after Jean Baptiste Debret (1768–1848). From: J.B.Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, Paris (Firmin Didot Frères) 1834–39, Table 36.
Homepage Credits: By Rod Waddington from Kergunyah, Australia - Surmi Warrior 2, Tulgit, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikipedia Commons
Bunse Island Map: "Bense [Bunce] Island and Fort, Sierra Leone, ca. 1727", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed March 19, 2021, Slavery Images
Our research addresses historical wrongs and the problems of lost identities created by the global slave trade, and asks how a visual approach to data collection may give rise to new discoveries and findings.
