Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, circa 1500-1867.

The project centers on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. DATAS is a repository of information on the languages spoken by individuals who were forced into slavery and the supposed ethnic identifications associated with those languages.

DATAS is involved in the development of a method for analyzing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism that constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa.

The methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools and a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about data justice, research transparency and demography. DATAS consists of a network of scholars centered in three countries: Canada, France, and Britain, with participating scholars from a dozen countries.