• 1 All the links in this introduction were valid in November 2020.
• 2 See Chris Alen Sula et al. 2017. See also Mégane de Amorim, ‘À quoi mènent les masters en “humanit (...)

1Text Encoding Initiative, metadata, relational database, linked open data, data mining, Dublin Core Schemas, GIS, XML, CSS, Javascript, back end, front end… The vocabulary characteristic of what are known as the digital humanities is not always easy to understand, or to use. Yet the field is a fashionable one, as can be seen, for instance, from the call for projects by funding agencies in the humanities and social sciences, or the creation of specialized research centres on both sides of the Atlantic. In Canada, the l’Université de Montréal hosts the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques; the University of Victoria on the Pacific coast hosts a laboratory named ‘Electronic Textual Cultures Lab1’. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada very recently announced a programme of grants focused on ‘Skills and Work in the Digital Economy.’ In the spring of 2019, the French National Research Agency launched a Flash Call, ‘Open science: research practices and open research data,’ with a budget of more than two million euros. The keywords of the twenty-five selected projects are ‘interoperability,’ ‘open data,’ ‘data management,’ ‘e-infrastructure,’ and even ‘impulser la science ouverte’ (‘boosting open science’)—plenty of food for thought for the uninitiated. Digital technology could apparently give a much-needed boost to the meaning and legitimacy of the the humanities and social sciences, guaranteeing a heightened form of awareness and transferability of knowledge to non-specialized audiences, while also making it possible to create pathways between the separate territories of historians, anthropologists and other sociologists and the ‘real’ world. It would seem too that the digital humanities could go hand in hand with innovative teaching practices, as one might deduce from the increase since the early 2000s in the number of Master’s and other postgraduate degrees with a digital profile. Master’s in ‘Digital Humanities’ at the University of Paris, Sciences & Lettres. Specialized training in the same subject at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, formerly the University of Valenciennes. Lyon 2, Paris 8, Montpellier 3, McGill University in Montreal, several programmes in the Netherlands and the United States:2 the trend is clear, the time has come for the humanities—but not in the traditional sense.

• 3 See the discussions in the Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘The Digital Humanities Debacle,’ Nan Z. (...)
• 4 On this question, see the paper delivered by Miriam Posner at the Keystone Digital Humanities conf (...)
• 5 On all these questions, and in general on the various debates surrounding the digital humanities, (...)

2The field may be fashionable, but it is far from commanding universal agreement.3 The digital humanities are, for example, accused of reproducing mainstream models, and furthermore of being a means of entry to the university world for neo-liberal operators. The humanities which rely upon the most up-to-date technology are said to depend upon data which reflect systemic bias, and are therefore likely to perpetuate asymmetrical power-structures affecting gender, race or social class.4 It is said that this field plays to the advantage of prestigious universities in countries with a colonial tradition, and of the highest-profile scholars, since, rather than working in favour of the decolonization of knowledge, it enables them to monopolize the scarce resources allocated to the humanities and social sciences.5 The term ‘digital humanities’ appears sometimes to be used very loosely: some people invoke it as soon as they use an open source computer programme or develop a smartphone application or a website. A further criticism relates to the work done behind the scenes by menial research assistants—underpaid students who key information into a database, coders and graphic designers who keep it up and running, etc.—who are often invisible behind the persons responsible for projects that gain huge media coverage, or enable one university institution to distinguish itself from another, and thus encourage the hyper-competitiveness that is characteristic of our present system for the production of knowledge.

• 6 This question was recently the subject of a round-table discussion at the Modern Language Associat (...)
• 7 See in particular the Jupyter project and hub, https://jupyter.org/index.html.

3Not only do they not command universal agreement, but the digital humanities raise practical or epistemological questions which are sometimes difficult to unravel. How, for instance, can one assess the ‘results’ of a digital humanities researcher in an application for a grant or promotion?6 How can one reconcile the expectations of research institutions with those of peer-review panels that use traditional criteria to assess the production of their colleagues? How can one measure the percentage of real responsibility of the director of a given research project, whose name is essential for the gaining of major funding, but whose true specialism is closer to the traditional humanities? Should doctoral students in history, sociology, anthropology and other humanities and social science disciplines all be capable of writing a computer programme once they have gained their degree, or is it still possible to stand up against the digital groundswell? How can one guarantee the long-term survival of projects once the technology used for them has become obsolete, or research funding has dried up (Smithies et al. 2019)? How should projects which have become dormant be archived? How can one use open-source federative software tools to reduce production costs and share resources from one project to another?7 How can one measure the impact of a digital product on the basis of simple web traffic statistics? How can one use comparable projects to evaluate the cost/benefit ratio obtained? And more broadly, how and why should digital humanists be accountable to funding agencies and to companies which finance them?

• 8 Hall 1999. The data were first uploaded to the website ‘Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718 (...)
• 9 http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/page/welcome. This site is now under the direction of (...)

4Despite the criticisms and the pitfalls, the history of slave trading and slavery in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean—the very regions which are the subject of this dossier, unprecedented in the annals of Francophone historiography—has not escaped the turn—for there is indeed a turning point—of the digital humanities. The CD-ROM projects of the late 1990s and early 2000s have given way to huge interdisciplinary and international initiatives bringing together tens and sometimes hundreds of actors, academics, technicians, programmers and research centres. The pioneers, as several of the authors of this dossier remind us, were the creators of the highly influential database on the Transatlantic slave trade, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database published on CD-ROM (Eltis et al. 1999), and known today by the name of Slave Voyages. This resource made it possible to refine our knowledge, in both quantitative and qualitative terms, of a traumatic episode that is fundamental to the history of the Americas. The database constructed between 1980 and 1990 by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on slavery and the slave trade in Louisiana (1719-1820), initially on CD-ROM and subsequently on line,8 also played a pioneering role, as did the platform of iconographic sources initiated by the anthropologist Jerome S. Handler, a specialist in slavery in Barbados—which cost very little to develop but has had a deep and lasting influence over the past two decades.9

• 10 See the collection entitled ‘Esclavage et résistance’:
• 11 See also the database of family names in Guadeloupe and Martinique (‘Les noms de familles guadelou (...)
• 12 See also the website ‘Traite négrière, esclavage et abolitions, pour un inventaire muséographique’ (...)

5Digital projects relating directly or indirectly to slavery have multiplied in recent years, driven by researchers, university centres (in particular ‘Matrix—The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences’ at Michigan State University), but also by government organisations, libraries and actors in the world of archives or pressure groups. There are plenty of examples: the hugely informative Digital Library of the Caribbean based at the University of Florida,10 or the Banque numérique des patrimoines martiniquais or ‘Manioc,’ a collaborative project led by the Université des Antilles and the Université de la Guyane.11 In a different geographical context, significant databases (for example on anti-slavery, or the laws governing slaves and the slave trade) have been created within the framework of Eurescl, a major European project directed by the co-editor-in-chief of the present journal, Myriam Cottias. In France, the Comité national pour la mémoire et l’histoire de l’esclavage, and its successor the Fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage, have launched several digital initiatives, in particular relating to the memorial sites of slavery.12 In the United Kingdom the outcome of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007-2008 was to set in motion a wide-ranging reflection on how to raise awareness of the inheritance of a slave-trading past in the social and political structures of the countries formerly under the colonial rule of the British Empire.

• 13 A similar database, created with funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) programme (...)

6One result of this reflection has been the very recent uploading of the ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’ database, which makes it possible to identify slave-owners over the long period of British involvement in slavery, not only in the Caribbean but also in the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.13

• 14 See for example the work of Walter Johnson, Trevor Burnard, and more recently Randy Browne. Furthe (...)

8In spite of repeated criticism over the past twenty years of the concept of ‘slave agency,’ which some consider to be clichéd or badly defined,14 the slaves’ agency, or capacity for action, and the search for the voices expressing their resistance, are generally central to projects which claim to belong to the digital humanities—whatever their country of origin. Technologies should make it possible to come closer to the lived experience of enslaved people and to highlight their humanity and their ceaseless quest for dignity. This approach ties in with another, the biographical, which has been very influential in recent years in studies of the Black Atlantic (Lindsay & Sweet 2013). The life-stories and voices of slaves are, for example, central to a platform hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (‘North American Slave Narratives’), which brings together several dozen slave narratives, digitized and re-transcribed in their entirety. At the University of Glasgow, a database of runaway slaves announced in the British press (‘Runaway Slaves in Britain: bondage, freedom and race in the eighteenth century’) has shed light on the lives of men and women who for so long were hidden away and forgotten in the columns of 18th-century newspapers. This database has had a significant impact beyond the university world, as is clear from the production of a short film, 1745. An Untold Story of Slavery on the fate of two women slaves on the run in Scotland. Another database, this time American, ‘Rediscovering The Stories Of Self-Liberating People,’ has as its mission to collect, via crowdsourcing, all the runaway advertisements published in the United States. Yet another initiative, ‘Enslaved. Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade’ aims to link several substantial data collections in order to maximize the chances of reconstructing the history of slaves forced to grow sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, indigo etc., or employed as servants or artisans in the slave societies of the Americas.

• 15 See the very fine interview she gave to the Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 July 2016 : https://la (...)
• 16 On marronnage, see also the ‘Mapping marronage’ project directed by Annette Josette-Gabriel.

9In all these projects and countries, the leading lights of contemporary historiography have joined in the digital game and explored non-traditional means of publication with a view to countering the imperialist bias of the archives, making hitherto silent voices heard, and if possible reforming the genre of the printed scientific article, which is particularly time-consuming to produce and reaches a very restricted readership. Such is the case for example of Ada Ferrer (‘Digital Aponte’), of Simon Newman (‘Hidden In Plain Sight: Escaped Slaves In Late Eighteenth- And Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaica’), of Vincent Browne (‘Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761’), of Bryan Wagner (‘Louisiana Slave Conspiracies’), and, from a more militant point of view, of Jessica Marie Johnson,15 a pioneering figure in the radical Black humanities—as can be seen from the ‘Electric marronnage’ project, one of the research and research dissemination platforms to which she contributes.16

• 17 I owe this expression (‘un plissement numérique du monde’) to Jean-Max Noyer: https://archivesic.c (...)

10The six articles in this dossier, on the history of slave trading in the Atlantic Ocean (Henry Lovejoy and Andrew Sluyter), and in the Indian Ocean and the surrounding Asian maritime areas (Ulbe Bosma et al.; Rafaël Thiébaut), on escaping as a form of resistance (Léon Robichaud), and on the ethical problems arising from the archives of the post-slavery period (Katrina Keefer et al.), all belong to this digital wave that is sweeping over the history of slaveries in modern times. The authors propose, at a heuristic level, a set of what seem to us promising pathways towards a means of understanding appropriate for a ‘digital creasing of the world’.17 This ‘creasing’ is, we believe, likely to bring those researching the world of slaves and their audiences closer together by applying non-conventional analytical criteria to new sources, or to sources which have been re-assessed with the help of new tools.

• 18 I owe this expression (‘un style d’enquête’) to Silvia Marzagalli (Marzagalli 2001).

11The act of ‘creasing’—that is to say using the digital humanities to raise the surface of what was traditionally smoothed over by the sources—is based on a ‘style of enquiry’18 common to all six authors of this dossier concerned with the ‘best practices’ in their disciplines. If the traditional humanities and social sciences are based on methodological approaches that are constantly in flux but nonetheless relatively stable over time, the encounter between the digital humanities and our field of research must involve an element of introspection, aimed at separating out the right approaches, and the right tools, from mistaken manoeuvres and paths best left unexplored.