Slave Societies Digital Archive

The Cultural Heritage Preservation Summit, hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries this summer, brought together experts from across the United States and Canada and showcased the libraries’ leadership in digital preservation and access. Read More

The new Digital Lab combines three library departments—Digital Scholarship and Communications, the Digital Commons, and the Center for Digital Humanities—into one overarching unit, realizing efficiencies that advance the Heard Libraries’ goal of facilitating transdisciplinary research and teaching through cohesive services. Read More

Vanderbilt University is now a member of the International Image Interoperability Framework, an international consortium of universities and other cultural heritage institutions using a standard for viewing, comparing and annotating digital objects. Read More

Professional schools across the university helped set the stage for Discovery Vanderbilt’s commitment to expanding research and collaboration. Read More

Vanderbilt University has become the newest member of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium as part of its reinvigorated commitment to confront racial injustice while working toward a more inclusive and welcoming campus community. Read More

Daniel Genkins, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of History, worked with the Data Science Institute to build a machine learning pipeline to process digitized ecclesiastical records that touch on the lives of people of African descent, both free and enslaved, in the early modern Atlantic. Read More

Benn Torres is joined by a team of faculty across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and history to Latin American studies and literature, who are filling in the gaps of our knowledge about the African diaspora and bringing a fresh perspective to its present-day consequences. Read More

As communities throughout the South struggle to determine appropriate ways of recognizing Civil War history, Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History, and Postdoctoral Fellow Angela Sutton have worked to draw attention to Fort Negley as a site that teaches the tragedy of slavery as well as celebrates the contributions of free and enslaved black people to Nashville and the nation’s history. Read More

Vanderbilt’s Slave Societies Digital Archive hosted scholars from around the world for its third Digital Humanities and the History of Slavery workshop at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Read More

A new exhibit at the Wond’ry showcasing the work of Vanderbilt’s Slave Societies Digital Archive will feature some unusual pieces of digital preservation: 3D-printed replicas of significant artifacts. Read More

A digital hub to be housed at Michigan State University will link Vanderbilt's Slave Societies Digital Archive to eight other digital collections of slave records around the country. Read More