About the Journal

The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation is a digital academic journal that publishes data articles describing original datasets about the lives of enslaved Africans from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation builds from and expands upon the pioneering digital scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade. As such, the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation elevates curated data to first-class publication status, providing scholarly review, recognition, and credit to those who undertake the intellectual work involved in generating, contextualizing, standardizing, and describing digital records related to historical bondage and freedom in Africa and its diaspora.

The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation works in conjunction with Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (Enslaved.org) to make the data contributed discoverable and interactive and to establish a sustainable scholarly repository for digital projects concerned with the history of African slavery. The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation focuses mainly on publishing and preserving data articles, whereas Enslaved.org acts as an interactive, searchable repository for digital data. All datasets published by the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation will be included on Enslaved.org and preserved in the Harvard Dataverse or other appropriate repository.