Databases can be a crucial part of organizing information, regardless of your field or methodology. In this workshop I will take participants through two databases that I recently constructed as part of my research in Atlantic World Slavery. The first is a database that is built off archival material that looks like data: There are values, defined categories, and a clear unit of analysis. This database is the database behind the article, “Cross-Cultural Trade and the Slave Ship the Bonne Société." The second is a database built off archival material that looks like narrative text. Here, the data is less readily apparent and I, along with a research team, coded the letters in order to convert qualitative material into discrete bits of comparable data. This database is the database behind the article "(Un)principled Agents: Monitoring Loyalty after the End of the Royal African Company Monopoly," forthcoming in Business History Review. In this workshop, I'll illustrate some principles of database construction and strategies to address the challenges of working with historical data.

Dr. Anne Ruderman is an assistant professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. She is also the project director of Royal African Company Networks, a Digital Humanities project designed to explore the possibilities of using computational text analysis and geospatial analysis tools to investigate over 3000 letters of the Royal African Company, England’s late seventeenth-century African trade monopoly. Learn more about Anne at www.anneruderman.com

This workshop is sponsored by: the Department of History, the Center for the Humanities and Arts, the Center of African and African America Studies, and the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship, at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Digtial Slavery Research Lab.