Statement of Ethics (8/2024)
Dangerous Harbor seeks to make archival court records of seventeenth-century escape attempts accessible to the public, and through its collaborative approach, promote research and visibility of the experiences of individuals in these records. We work towards representation which centers the humanity of people involved in resistance to bonded labor and slavery, and acknowledges the legacy and impact of their stories for communities today.
We recognize that archival records and data systems are not neutral. Seventeenth-century court records were written by a clerk or other free white man; this perspective is further filtered through a present-day transcriber’s understanding of the text, and then into the rows and columns of the dataset. The material is therefore reflective of multiple perspectives, the power structures of the courtroom, and the constraints of the database format. Many of the early-modern terms commonly used in the records to describe people of color, Indigenous people, and women were and continue to be harmful.
We follow the lead of established projects like Enslaved.org in building a digital infrastructure that is oriented toward sharing research in a findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable manner following the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Drawing from the expertise of our advisory board and the experiences of our students, our interdisciplinary team aims to contextualize this material, while providing access to original texts. In our own descriptions, we will use “people-first” language (i.e., “enslaved person,” “Indigenous person”) and provide a pop-up warning for users where harmful language is used in archival texts. We will make our project processes transparent and replicable by providing documentation for our decisions as the project develops. We are also guided by the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. We pledge to invite tribal leaders and/or historians whose traditional homelands we work to become involved through the tribal liaison at Virginia Tech and the Virginia Tribal Education Consortium, and notify tribal leaders of any tribe-specific records, provide copies as desired, and provide or amend updates on the accessibility of those records as required. Desires of tribal leadership regarding accessibility or research may change; we commit to remaining in dialogue.
We believe that responsible preparation of datasets based on deep historical research should be recognized as scholarship. We will provide opportunities for students, traditional and nontraditional, to join us as researchers and co-producers of knowledge credited for their finished work. Stewarding data, including the digitized images upon which our dataset is based, is a long-term commitment and we pledge to engage in sustainable preservation. Read our data repository agreement here.
We welcome your feedback and questions; please contact us at jessicataylor@vt.edu.
