Piloting Interactive Data Science Learning Platforms through the Development of Cloud-based Computational Digital Notebooks¶
This Project uses Maryland State Archives' Legacy of Slavery Dataset Collection - Certificates of Freedom as a Case Study¶
- Author: Rajesh Kumar GNANASEKARAN
- Collaborator: Richard MARCIANO
- Community Members: Maya DAVIS, Christopher HALEY (Maryland State Archives), Lyneise WILLIAMS (VERA Collaborative), Mark CONRAD (NARA)
- Source Available: https://github.com/cases-umd/Legacy-of-Slavery
- License: Creative Commons - Attribute 4.0 Intl
- Prior Publications: 1. L. A. Perine, R. K. Gnanasekaran, P. Nicholas, A. Hill and R. Marciano, "Computational Treatments to Recover Erased Heritage: A Legacy of Slavery Case Study (CT-LoS)," 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 1894-1903, doi: 10.1109/BigData50022.2020.9378110. 2. P. Nicholas, R.K. Gnanasekaran, L. Perine, A. Hill, R. Marciano. (2020). Establishing a Research Agenda for Archival Science through Interdisciplinary Collaborations between Archivists and Technologists. 2020 SAA Research Forum (invited for submission and under consideration).
Introduction¶
The Legacy of Slavery Project at the Maryland State Archives (MSA)¶
This module is based on a case study involving The "Legacy of Slavery Project" archival records from the Maryland State Archives. The Legacy of Slavery in Maryland is a major initiative of the Maryland State Archives. The program seeks to preserve and promote the vast universe of experiences that have shaped the lives of Maryland’s African American population. Over the last 18 years, some 420,000 individuals have been identified and data has been assembled into 16 major databases. The Maryland State Archives holds two essential types of records documenting freedom within its collections. The first are Manumissions, legal documents that frees an enslaved person from slavery on behalf of the slave holder. The second are Certificates of Freedom, documents that resulted from a 1805 General Assembly law that sought to identify Maryland’s free African American population and to control the availability of freedom papers. This legislation required those who were born free, or those who received their freedom from a slave owner, to record proof of their status in the county court. These documents, found in 111 record series at the Maryland State Archives arranged by the county of issuance, contain vital information about those who were enslaved. Everything from the names, age, physical description, location of the recipient’s birth and rearing, and names of the slave holder or witness who confirmed the person’s free status is usually included. These records have been uploaded and made available through the Legacy of Slavery searchable database. More information could be obtained from here. The AIC has now partnered with the Maryland State Archives to help interpret this data and reveal hidden stories. This case study is performed on this dataset collection, referred to as the "Certificates of Freedom" (CoF) dataset.
Certificates of Freedom in the State of Maryland¶
A Certificate of Freedom is a legal document that was issued to African Americans who were required to record proof of their freedom in the county court. The court would then issue them a Certificate of Freedom. If the person had been previously manumitted by an act of the slaveholder, the court clerk or register of wills would look up the manumitting document before issuing a certificate of freedom.
¶
One of the latest revelations which got public attention was the story of Smith Price, a founding member of the African Meeting House in Annapolis, which eventually became the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1803. According to Rebecca Morehouse here, in 1980 excavations of certain burial remains were found which was later studied to be belonging to Mr. Smith Price, an enslaved later freed African American on whose land the Asbury United Methodist Church stands as of today. Several people, notably researcher Janice Hayes-Williams, worked hard to get approval for a reburial ceremony of Mr. Price's remains at St Anne's cemetery in Annapolis. A conjectural drawing of Smith Price by a forensic artist detective is shown here:
Source
Upon analysis in the Certificates of Freedom dataset collection, we were able to find Smith Price's CoF as shown here:
By looking at the Smith Price's CoF, the conjectural drawing and the article published above gives us a chance to connect to the lives of enslaved people and several such stories and insights are still buried deep in the documents as dataset collections at the MSA.
One other example is of an enslaved woman named "Lot Bell" who was identified in the CoF collection, and a forensic artist made a similar conjectural drawing of her as shown below: An article link here describes the project below led by Chris Haley at the Maryland State Archives.
These images tell us that the CoF dataset collection is a repository of rich cultural and human values which when seen through the contemporary scholar's lenses could unravel many more interesting and eyeopening insights as the ones above.
Computational Thinking Framework¶
This Project is organized in steps based on the Computational Thinking framework presented by David Weintrop’s model of computation thinking
Of these 4 major Practices, this Project applies 2 of them as indicated below:
Computational Thinking Practices¶
Data Practices¶
- Manipulating Data
- Analyzing Data
- Visualizing Data
All Computational Problem Solving Practices¶
Learning Goals¶
Archival Practices¶
- Digital Records and Access Systems
Ethics and Values Considerations¶
- Contexualized Analysis of Data
Software and Tools¶
- Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyter Lab
- Python and libraries supported by it
Notebooks¶
The below module is organized into a sequential set of Python Notebooks that allows to interact with the Legacy of Slavery's Certificates of Freedom collection by exploring, cleaning, preparing, visualizing and analysing it from historical context perspective.
- Certificates Of Freedom: Context Based Data Manipulation and Analysis Part 1
- Certificates Of Freedom: Context Based Data Manipulation and Analysis Part 2
- Certificates Of Freedom: Context Based Data Visualization (If you get a 500 Internal Server Error, please refresh the browser to render this module again)