Chair: Jessica Marie Johnson (@jmjafrx) is Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the Director of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Curator at #ADPhDProjects.

Digitization of colonial sources has created an array of new information on Black and Indigenous life and culture that historians can use to make conclusions about early North American history. These new repositories, however, have only begun to reveal their full potential. Likewise, a suite of digital tools exists to explore and visualize archival material in novel ways. This panel explores the multiple avenues for recovering histories of Black and Indigenous life from documents created by French settlers, slaveowners, and administrators of eighteenth-century Louisiana. As a LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure project, Keywords for Black Louisiana: Enslaved and Free in Gulf Coast Louisiana uses the Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project as a resource for surfacing these submerged Black and Indigenous histories, drafting a corpus of keywords that map the rich texture of Black and Indigenous in this earlier era. Panelists describe the experience of researching, transcribing, translating, and organizing documents; the process of developing a digital scholarly edition; the ethical praxis followed; tools used; and the successes and struggles of attempting to turn an archive inside out and make vulnerable histories available for future researchers.

The Featured Image for this talk is The French Market-The Hen Trader, Scribner’s Monthly (Nov. 1873-Apr. 1874), vol. VII, p. 147. (Copy in Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library) via Slavery Images

Olivia Barnard is a PhD student in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Tulane University in Political Science and Africana Studies, where her honors thesis earned her the distinction of “senior scholar.” Her research interests include histories of slavery, womanhood, widowhood and gender in mid-18th century New Orleans and its Atlantic world. Through the “Keywords for Black Louisiana” project under LifexCode, Olivia explores the rival geographies created by free and enslaved Black people in 1740s Louisiana as well as the scholarly networks and support that shaped the pioneering work of Dr. John Blassingame.

Emma Katherine Bilski (@genuinebilski) is a PhD candidate in History at the Johns Hopkins University. She received her Masters in Imperial History at the University of Oxford. Broadly, Emma is interested in the intersections between spirituality and empire in the early modern Atlantic world, particularly in the circum-Caribbean. Her dissertation research focuses on gender, labor, and religious violence in Spanish/Indigenous Florida. As part of LifexCode’s Keywords for Black Louisiana team, she specializes in the multilingual paleography and documentary analysis that forms the analog side of this research.

Leila K. Blackbird (Apache/Cherokee), is the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago in the fields of Early Colonial U.S. & Native American History, Comparative Empire & Slavery in the Black Atlantic, and Postcolonial Theory & Ecocriticism. Her research focuses on genocide, enslavement, state violence, historical trauma, and environmental racism. In addition to the Pozen Center, Leila is affiliated with the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (NCAIS) and the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies. She holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in History from the University of New Orleans and an M.A. in History from the University of Chicago

Elena Palazzolo is a doctoral student in History at Johns Hopkins University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts with honors in History and French from University of Richmond. Working broadly in the fields of United States and Atlantic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her interests include food, memory, and gender and sexuality. Palazzolo is also engaged with using digital humanities to explore, analyze, and challenge traditional historical archives. She currently acts as digital strategist of the Keywords for Black Louisiana research group under LifexCode.

This session will not be recorded.