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.