2026/04/30 by Irene Elmerot, Leif-Jöran Olsson, Klas Rönnbäck · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies #Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41597-026-07340-x
openalex publication_date 2026/04/30 · openalex created_date 2026/05/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
These data consist of newly OCRed and annotated narratives, both autobiographical texts written by, and interviews with, formerly enslaved persons of African descent in the United States of America and the Caribbean, including extensive time-related and geographical metadata. The texts authored by these individuals span from the years 1795 to approximately 1900, while the interviews were conducted in the 1930s. The former are written in standardised English from that time, whereas the latter often are written down in mediated, vernacular form, causing issues in lemmatisation and part-of-speech tagging. The aim is to create openly accessible corpora that can be utilised for the purpose of researching how these formerly enslaved persons described their own lives.