Mapping Memories of Madagascar

Wendy Wilson-Fall's new, important project. From the website:

Researcher: Wendy Wilson-Fall, Africana Studies
Project Description: This digital humanities project was born out of the realization that mapping would be a great way to document the geographic locations of the family narratives and plantations tied to planters who bought Malagasy slaves between 1719 and 1721, as discussed in my book, Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic (Ohio University Press, 2015). As I came to the end of that book project, I also realized that I could perhaps learn something more from a visualization of the human geography of the Malagasy migration experiences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For these reasons, I turned to Lafayette’s digital technology staff  at the Skillman Library.  Several discussions with the Director of Digital Technologies, Eric Luhrs, helped me to understand more about the digital humanities, and I was encouraged to work with a newly hired Digital GIS Visualization specialist, John Clark.  John and I spent many hours and had numerous meetings to discuss the possibilities that a digital humanities approach could bring to further exploring the subject of African American narratives about Malagasy ancestors.  We also spent a lot of time talking about and researching American trade in the Indian Ocean.  Eventually, we applied for a series of grants.
Through support from a Mellon Grant for Digital Humanities that was awarded to Lafayette, we joined other colleagues who had embarked on digital humanities projects. We organized a meeting with Reber Dunkel, formally a professor at  Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. Reber is well versed in local Virginia history and was instrumental in helping me to gather information from families in the Ashland-Hanover area. Second, I reached out to interested students, and in June 2015, two student assistants, Jethro Israel and Clara Randimbiarimanana ( a student from Madagascar), John Clark and I traveled to the Peabody Essex Museum library in Salem, Massachusetts to spend several days poring over ship logs, captains’ journals, and business notes from the sailing community of New England during its heyday of Indian Ocean trade. This effort led us to the current stage of the project: exploring the conditions and networks that would have made it possible for Malagasy sailors and merchants to travel with American ships to the United States between 1790 and 1850.
- See more at: http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/madagascar