Descendants and Ethical Considerations when Documenting the Names of Enslaved People in Datasets on the Internet

This paper examines the ethical implications of public, internet-based history projects that list enslaved people by name. It does so by considering the appropriateness of the ethics statement written by the Principal Investigators at Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (or Enslaved.org). Enslaved.org directly addresses the urgent call to document the history of people of African descent more fully. Housed at Michigan State University, the project centers the Black experience globally, with most projects to date focused on North America. Contributors to Enslaved.org tell the stories of named enslaved individuals by extracting what is often fragmentary information (names, ages, skills, injuries, African ethnicities, etc.) from a vast range of primary source documentation and by assembling that data into datasets. The Enslaved.org team makes the datasets available, searchable, and understandable on its open-source platform (https://enslaved.org/) and through its peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (https://jsdp.enslaved.org/). The Principal Investigators are committed to identifying by name as many enslaved people as possible and to representing individual and collective experiences in an international, humane, and ethical frame and to working collaboratively with researchers and descendant communities to continually develop and follow practices that respect the lives of enslaved people. The paper considers the appropriateness of the Enslaved.org ethics statement for datasets focused on slavery in a variety of places and concludes with a call for historians to work closely with descendant communities in compiling and publishing data that names enslaved individuals.