TrayectoriasAfro.org: Building Collaborative Infrastructure for Afrodescendant Histories

This presentation reflects on the ongoing development of trayectoriasafro.org, a digital platform created to trace the lives, movements, and social relations of enslaved people and their enslavers across the territories of the former Viceroyalty of New Spain. Designed as a collaborative, multilingual research tool, TrayectoriasAfro foregrounds a specific goal: to make visible the trajectories of individuals whose lives were documented through violence and erasure. This clear focus allowed for the development of a platform purpose-built to support this line of inquiry—while remaining flexible enough to accommodate a diversity of source types, including notarial, judicial, and sales records. The project began with a growing spreadsheet of data—names, dates, and places extracted from archival sources. As the research expanded, the limitations of general-purpose tools like Excel became evident: errors in versioning, lack of schema enforcement, and difficulty coordinating multi-user edits. While more established digital platforms such as Omeka offer structure, they can also impose rigid content models that force projects to adapt to the tool, rather than the other way around. This prompted the decision to build a tailored solution using a Django-based relational database, specifically designed to reflect the complexity of Afrodescendant histories and the collaborative nature of the research. The talk outlines the transition from spreadsheets to a web-based infrastructure, emphasizing both technical decisions and their epistemological implications. It discusses how Django Rest Framework was used to create an API layer that allows for modular and future-facing interfaces—interactive maps, advanced filters, and data editing tools—while preserving a consistent data model on the backend. Through this process, technical decisions became opportunities to revisit questions of representation, such as how to structure place names, temporal uncertainty, or overlapping identities. These discussions were not just about usability; they became moments of epistemological reflection, where the design of the database was negotiated with the project’s researchers and collaborators. Rather than a polished end product, the platform is presented as a space of negotiation and co-authorship. What fields should be mandatory? How do we represent partial information without imposing artificial structure? What relationships deserve to be explicitly modeled in the schema? These questions were addressed through dialogue, reflecting a commitment to collaboration, care, and the politics of historical representation. By sharing this process, the presentation contributes to larger conversations in digital humanities around infrastructure design, data justice, and sustainable scholarship. It makes the case for tailored, flexible platforms that are shaped by project needs rather than retrofitted to existing tools—especially in projects that engage with marginalized histories and multilingual, transnational research teams. TrayectoriasAfro.org remains a work in progress, but its development sheds light on broader themes: how tools shape thinking, how communities shape tools, and how collaborative digital infrastructure can support more equitable approaches to historical knowledge production.