Project Overview
Many historical accounts of the Anglo-American institution of slavery, the slave trade, and abolitionist movements have been written from the perspective of white Britons and Americans. In recent years, historians have begun to revise these accounts, bringing the accounts and voices of enslaved and formerly enslaved black men and women into the dominant discourse.
I hope to contribute to this revision by bringing more attention to the broad corpus of narratives written by and about these formerly enslaved people.
My exploration of this corpus has focused on "distant reading" through topic modeling, a technique that uses probabilistic models to identify categories of words that frequently appear together.
This exploration began with my own close reading of the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, one of the most prominent African voices in late 18th Century Britain. Equiano, a former slave, published his autobiography in 1789, and died in 1797.The English slave trade was abolished ten years after his death, and while he and his autobiography are generally credited with influence in this cause, I hope that this project will encourage more attention to the many other narratives that have historically been overlooked.