Bethany Warner, Junior Researcher, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
The 12th edition of the Digital Humanities Benelux conference took place last week at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam.
The DH Benelux conference is one of the main venues for disseminating research and exchanging ideas within the community of interdisciplinary Digital Humanities research.
As we explore digital methods to further our research on slavery and resistance to it, members of our project team (Britt van Duijvenvoorde and Pascal Konings) collaborated with colleagues at the Huygens Institute (Rick Mourits, Thunnis van Oort and Kay Pepping), to present their work, Modelling the enslaved as historical persons: Extending the Persons in Context (PiCo) model to fit a 19th century slave society.
This presentation illustrated extensions to the PiCo data model to provide more accurate depictions of the relationships existing in colonial societies and the changing nature of social status. This can include someone’s statement related to ‘freedom’, relationships of ownership and enslavement, but also to look for other identifying traits for enslaved people beyond their relationship to enslavement, such as person names and changing statuses.
More details about the model can be found here.