How shall we represent their lives? The careful and responsible representation of what we can know about the lived experiences of the enslaved is a central focus of current digital work both for historians and for library and archives professionals. In attempting to answer that question, this talk will trace Leon’s interconnected research agenda through three distinct but related projects: 1) an individual project focused on enslaved people in Maryland: Life and Labor Under Slavery: the Jesuit Plantation Project; 2) a collaborative effort to develop and test a linked data ontology to represent the experiences of the enslaved people who labored for educational institutions in the US: On These Grounds: Slavery and the University; and 3) a linked data driven web publishing platform: Omeka S. In reflecting on these projects, Leon will explore the ways that this work contributes both to slavery studies and to critical archival studies, and how it offers a potential model for future interdisciplinary collaborations.
Tue 18 Nov 2025
