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CAVE HILL CAMPUS JOINS PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY CONSORTIUM
The Cave Hill Campus broke new ground on March 10, 2022 when it became the first non-US-based university to serve as a consortium member to SlaveVoyages, the preem- inent online resource dedicated to the study of the trade of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The Campus is represented on the Consortium by Drs Tara Inniss and Rodney Worrell, lecturers in the Department of History and Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Dr Inniss serves on the Steering Committee, while Dr Worrell serves on the Operational Committee. The origins of SlaveVoyages trace back to the 1960s as historians began researching data on the numbers of enslaved Africans to have crossed the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries. The data was eventually compiled to a CD-ROM published in 1999 and, in 2008, launched as a website hosted by Emory University. In March 2021, the SlaveVoyages Consortium was formed, dedicated to preserving and developing what has become the most widely used online resource for study of slavery across the Atlantic World. Consortium members include: the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at William & Mary, Rice University and three campuses at the University of California that will assume a joint membership: UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley. The website is currently hosted at Rice University, powered by Oracle for Research. The database, which is managed and operated by the Consortium, has played an integral role in broadening access to archival materials – including ship registers, sales ledgers and recorded names of freed African people, among many other documents – relating to the traffic. The Campus will work with SlaveVoyages to advance research and study of the Barbados Archives, comprising tens of millions of documents tracing the gut-wrenching stories of individuals captured in Africa, brought by ship to Barbados, and sold to colonial enslavers on the island and throughout
A selection of materials from the Barbados Archives, which will become publicly accessible online as part of SlaveVoyages
the Americas. The digitisation of the Barbados Archives is a cornerstone project of the Barbados Heritage District for which the University is serving as a key educational partner. Planning has begun to retrofit an existing facility that will support the massive digitisation process of these archival records, anticipated to take five years to complete, in collaboration with global digitisation technology partners. The Barbados Heritage District is being developed at the direction of the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, QC, MP, Prime Minister of Barbados, under the auspices of the ROAD (Reclaiming Our Atlantic Destiny) Project, a multi- faceted initiative designed to transform the identity and economy of Barbados, providing unparalleled access to the history of the island nation, creating job growth and cata- pulting research and technological innovation. Prime Minister Mottley expressed that “the inclusion of the University of the West Indies as the first non-US consortium member of SlaveVoyages marks an important next step in
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES CAVE HILL CAMPUS ANNUAL REPORT TO COUNCIL 2021/2022
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