Defining Regions of Pre-Colonial Africa: A Controlled Vocabulary for Linking Open-Source Data in Digital History Projects

Lovejoy, Henry B.; Lovejoy, Paul E.; Hawthorne, Walter; Alpers, Edward A.; Candido, Mariana P.; Hopper, Matthew S.; Lydon, Ghislaine; Kriger, Colleen E.; Thornton, John

doi:10.1017/hia.2020.17

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Ogundiran has, for example, identified remains of cities that are currently not located on modern-day or historical secondary source maps, but could have been places destroyed in the conflicts surrounding Oyo's collapse (Ogundiran, 2003(Ogundiran, , 2005(Ogundiran, , 2007a. Planning for this long process of data collection and assimilation has begun, whereby a team of historians have re-regionalised Africa with a vocabulary that expressly implements a more neutral terminology to avoid terms associated with European slave traders, colonial states, and modern-day countries, which often confuse the representation of inland Africa before 1900 (Lovejoy et al, 2019(Lovejoy et al, , 2021.…”

Section: Contributions To Historical Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

Wiens

Lovejoy

Mullen

et al. 2022

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society

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Intra‐African conflicts during the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo from 1817 to 1836 resulted in the enslavement of an estimated 121,000 people who were then transported to coastal ports via complex trade networks and loaded onto slave ships destined for the Americas. Historians have a good record of where these people went across the Atlantic, but little is known about where individuals were from or enslaved within Africa. In this work, we develop a novel statistical modelling strategy to describe the enslavement of people given documented violent conflict, the transport of enslaved peoples from their location of capture to their port of departure, and—given an enslaved individual's location of departure—that person's probability of origin. We combine spatial prediction of conflict density via kriging with a Markov decision process characterising intra‐African transportation. The results of this model can be visualised using an interactive web application to plot—for the first time—estimated conditional probabilities of historical origins during the African diaspora. Understanding the likely origins within Africa of enslaved people may have ramifications for the history of the Atlantic world, whereby the ocean connects, rather than disconnects, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

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Section: Contributions To Historical Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

Wiens

Lovejoy

Mullen

et al. 2022

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Archaeologist Akinwumi Ogundiran has, for example, identified remains of cities that are currently not located on modern-day or historical secondary source maps, but could have been places destroyed in the conflicts surrounding Oyo's collapse (Ogundiran, 2003(Ogundiran, , 2005(Ogundiran, , 2007a. Planning for this long process of data collection and assimilation has begun, whereby a team of historians have re-regionalised Africa with a vocabulary that expressly implements a more neutral terminology to avoid terms associated with European slave traders, colonial states, and modern-day countries, which often confuse the representation of inland Africa before 1900 (Lovejoy et al, 2020).…”

Section: Paul E Lovejoy Has Argued That "The Internal Trade Of [Ensla...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating conditional probabilities of historical migrations in the transatlantic slave trade using kriging and Markov decision process models

Wiens,

Lovejoy,

Mullen

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Intra-African conflicts during the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo from 1817 to 1836 resulted in the enslavement of an estimated 121,000 people who were then transported to coastal ports via complex trade networks and loaded onto slave ships destined for the Americas. Historians have a good record of where these people went across the Atlantic, but little is known about where individuals were from or enslaved within Africa. In this work, we develop a novel two-step statistical approach to describe the enslavement of people given documented violent conflict, the transport of enslaved peoples from their location of capture to their port of departure, and-given an enslaved individual's location of departure-that person's probability of origin. We combine spatial prediction of conflict density via Kriging with a Markov decision process characterising intra-African transporta-

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Freedom Narratives: The West African Person as the Central Focus for a Digital Humanities Database

Delgado

2021

Hist. Afr.

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This article discusses the methodology behind the development of new tools of research for African history that are a user-friendly source for public engagement. The focus is on biographical profiles of West African people during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which is an innovative approach to social history. The representation of enslaved Africans has typically been numbers recorded in logs and accounts compiled by slave merchants and captains. Freedom Narratives is an open-source relational database that reveals the people who constitute those numbers.

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Defining Regions of Pre-Colonial Africa: A Controlled Vocabulary for Linking Open-Source Data in Digital History Projects

Cited by 4 publications

References 33 publications

A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

A Modelling Strategy to Estimate Conditional Probabilities of African Origins: The Collapse of the Oyo Empire and The Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1817–1836

Estimating conditional probabilities of historical migrations in the transatlantic slave trade using kriging and Markov decision process models

Freedom Narratives: The West African Person as the Central Focus for a Digital Humanities Database

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