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.
Sharon M. Leon is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University, where she is developing projects on digital public history and digital networking projects related to enslaved communities in Maryland. She is the director of the Omeka suite of web publishing platforms. She is a principle participant in MSU’s Consortium on Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research initiative. Leon received her Bachelors of Arts degree in American Studies from Georgetown University in 1997 and her doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her first book, An Image of God: the Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, was published by University of Chicago Press (May 2013). Prior to joining the History Department at MSU, Leon spent over thirteen years in George Mason University’s History Department at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as Director of Public Projects, where she oversaw collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country.
This session is part of the SYRASP Online Workshop Series “Syria After the Assad Regime: Community Voices, Research Methods, and Digital Tools”, organized in cooperation with The Lab for the Study for Violence. A description of the workshop series is avaible on SYRASP's website, including information on other sessions.
The session will take place online via Zoom. Participation upon prior registration via syrasp[at]trafo-berlin.de.