Launch event for Digital Archive of MA Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions

The Digital Archive of Massachusetts Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions

LAUNCH EVENT

Friday, February 27, 4:00–6:00 PM 
Tsai Auditorium (S010), CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA

This event will introduce a searchable online database of about 3,500 anti-slavery and anti-segregation petitions sent to the Massachusetts colonial and state legislatures from the years 1649 to 1870, now located at the Massachusetts Archives.

Each petition image is annotated with detailed information, and the data set provides web-based browsing, searching, and filtering, along with images of the digitized documents. The images and associated metadata will be distributed by the Harvard Dataverse Network infrastructure and will be made publicly available for the first time at this event, February 27, 2015.

SPEAKERS:

Daniel Carpenter

Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, Harvard University, and Faculty Director of the Social Sciences Program, Academic Ventures at the Radcliffe Institute

Martha Clark
Curator of the Massachusetts Archives

Michael Comeau
Executive Director of the Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum

Garth Griffin
Data Scientist for the Performance of Politics Initiative

Maggie Hale
Librarian for Collections Digitization, Preservation Services, Harvard Library

Beverly Hector-Smith
Historian of the Beacon Hill Scholars

John Stauffer
Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Christle Rawlins-Jackson
President of the Beacon Hill Scholars

Nicole Topich
Archivist for the Performance of Politics Initiative

Free and open to the public, this event is cosponsored by the Center for American Political Studies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and the Massachusetts Archives. The database is made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Harvard University Libraries, the Institutional Development Initiative, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.