Sarah Coffman

At the core of this project is the desire to use open-source digital tools to visualize racial demographics and the geographies of slavery and freedom in the early United States. This project hopes to marshal tools for geographic information systems (GIS), digital storytelling, and JavaScript-based presentation that explore user manipulation of the data and visuals in concert with the arrangement of information by the research and design team. In addition to making public maps that illustrate the demographic realities of race and slavery in the US between 1790 and 1850, the project will also develop an initial site that arranges and maps additional data concerning some of the ways Black communities in the early United States exerted agency across the same geographies.