Phrasing Insurrection: A Computational Study of the Grammars of Collective Enslaved Resistance Published in the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette between 1732 and 1775
This respository contains the associated data and code for Chloe Zehr's M.A. thesis, "Phrasing Insurrection: A Computational Study of the Grammars of Collective Enslaved Resistance in the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette between 1732 and 1775," completed in Fall, 2024, at the University of Colorado Boulder. This study explored how digital methods, such as text mining and computational corpus linguistics, can inform novel research questions and approaches to what we can know about white colonial conceptions of collective enslaved resistance in the eighteenth century. Moreover, this research calls into question how the grammars of colonial response were mutually constituted alongside the rise of hereditary racial slavery in colonial North America.
To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization — Frantz Fanon
Explore this project on GitHub Pages: Phrasing Insurrection
This repository contains the data, code, and visualizations developed for this project organized by content type and methodology.
- Corpus 1: This folder contains the data, code, and visualizations derived from my investigations of the South Carolina Gazette's reports that referenced collective enslaved resistance throughout its entire publication in the eighteenth century. For further documentation of this corpus and folder see the Corpus 1 README file.
- Corpus 2: This folder contains the data, code, and visualizations derived from my investigations of the Virginia Gazette's reports that referenced collective enslaved resistance in the eighteenth century - namely between 1736 and 1775. As my research notes, this corpus contains text data from multiple publications of the Virginia Gazette that were published in Williamsburg, VA, in the 1700s. For further documentation of this corpus and folder see the Corpus 2 README file.
- Corpus 3: This folder contains a tertiary dataset I derived from both the South Carolina Gazette and the Virginia Gazette regularly featured news, correspondence, and editorials that discussed non-slave-related forms of unrest from across the globe between the 1730s and 1770s. This corpus was primarily designed for content analysis. For further documentation of this corpus and folder see the Corpus 3 README file.
In the folders for Corpus 1, Corpus 2, and Corpus 3, the Data folder also includes respective corpus overview files that describe the variables/metadata collected for each corpus. I also created a Combined Corpus csv file (located in the main branch of this repository) that includes all the data from Corpus 1, Corpus 2, and Corpus 3.
Mapping: this folder contains two sub-folders of data, images, and code for developing interactive maps that highlight data on human trafficking and news of ensalved resistance published in the South Carolina Gazette and the Virginia Gazette.
- QGIS and Geo-Location Data: this folder contains general data from from the Slave Voyages Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American databases alongside versions of Corpus 1 and Corpus 2 that contain the longitude and latitude for locations that were referenced in reports that mentioned forms of collective enslaved resistance lead by people from Africa and their descendants.
- Leaflet Map: this folder contains the data and scripts used to run both shiny application maps I designed with the help of scholars at CU Boulder's Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship as well as with debugging assistance from OpenAI's ChatGPT 4. These maps can be explored on the project's GitHub Pages website.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
This project includes code and text partially generated with the assistance of OpenAI's ChatGPT for generating Markdown and HTML code in designing the GitHub pages project website as well as my interactive maps with leaflet using R. The use of AI-generated content is licensed under the same terms as the rest of the repository.
Chloe A. Zehr (she/they)
M.A., History, University of Colorado Boulder, 2024
- Certificate in Digital Humanities, 2024
B.A., History, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2021
Contact: [email protected] & [email protected]
I am beyond grateful for and indebted to the expertise, unwavering support, and feedback from the following scholars and interdisciplinary labs at the University of Colorado Boulder who helped me develop and revise this project:
- Dr. Honor Sachs (project advisor) at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders (History) at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Dr. Henry Lovejoy (History) at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Dr. David Glimp (English) at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Dr. Susan Brown (Linguistics) at the University of Colorado Boulder
- The Digital Slavery Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder
- The Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder
- The faculty and advisors for the Digital Humanities Certificate program at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Jo Guldi, The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
- Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021)
- David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
- Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2016)
- Robert Nowatzki, “From Datum to Databases: Digital Humanities, Slavery, and Archival Reparations,” The American Archivist 83, no. 2 (March 8, 2021): 429–48
- David A. Copeland, Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997)
- Jason T. Sharples, The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
- Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020)
- Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
- For contemporary scholarship at the intersections of data and slavery see the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation
- For recent conversations regarding redefining African regions the resource African Regions offers useful maps as well as historiographical context.