IATH NEWS
IATH Part of New NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to DAACS
February 14, 2018
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation's Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), in partnership with IATH and Convoy, Inc., has received an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for $325,000, to expand the DAACS Research Consortium (DRC). The new grant will fund the design, development, and implementation of a new phase of the DRC, offering greater flexibility and ease-of-use in digitization, cataloging, and presentation of data. The project team will also improve search tool functionality, so as to enable better scholarly collaboration and data sharing on a larger scale. IATH will take the lead on the development stages, but will be collaborating with project staff on the technical components of the grant work.
DAACS fosters inter-site, comparative archaeological research on slavery throughout the Chesapeake, the Carolinas, and the Caribbean. Its database and web site convert information from archaeological artifacts and their excavated contexts into web-accessible evidence that scholars and other stakeholders can use to advance our understating of early-modern (c. 1500-1860) slave societies in North America and the Caribbean. The DRC is a collaboration among scholars based in scattered academic and research institutions, built on the foundation offered by (DAACS). It fosters research that advances historical understanding of the slavery-based societies that evolved in the Atlantic World during the early-modern era; and serves as a useful model for encouraging new kinds of web-based scholarly collaboration and data sharing among archaeologists working in a single culture-historical context.
Convoy, Inc., has worked with DAACS since 2003 on the development of its web site, and has collaborated with IATH on the development of the DRC.
