Still Looking for Digital Justice

This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the Last Road to Freedom website, which I designed to tell the story of America’s Civil War contraband camps and to digitize transcribed registers for the camps. I remember one of my lofty goals was to have the term contraband camp become a household word. That goal itself was tied to a desire to provide descendants of once-enslaved persons a concrete roadmap to their pasts, something that contraband camp registers could make possible.

Ten years later, phrase contraband camp is not a household word though attention to the phenomenon has definitely increased within university history departments, especially those with a committed focus on Southern history, and there are three or four recent academic texts that treat the camps as a part of Civil War and emancipation stories.

But, to my surprise, no one other than myself has to my knowledge yet written about the registers, records of African Americans coming into the camps. And yet these records are of vital importance to descendants. Historians may be, inherently, more interested in constructing narratives of the past than in concrete sociological or humanistic implications of their work. However, the registers, directly connected to other records such as soldiers’ service records and pension files, are critical primary evidence of emancipation experienced by various families and individuals in different locations. Only by studying these records together can historians observe the complexities and diversity of experience, avoiding thereby presumptions and over-generalizations.

One could argue for instance…

Continue Reading Still Looking for Digital Justice on HASTAC’s site. HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists changing the way we teach and learn.