Digital Footprints: Freedom on the Move at the University of Kentucky

Abstract

During the late 18th through the mid-19th centuries, the Commonwealth of Kentucky saw significant movement of self-emancipated people seeking freedom from bondage. Often referred to as “runaways” or “fugitive slaves,” in historical texts, self-emancipated people defined freedom in many ways. These migrations were widely documented in newspaper advertisements known as fugitive slave advertisements and runaway ads in local newspapers published throughout the state. Access to these materials (often buried in databases or on microform) has been problematic at best. Enter the Self Emancipated and Enslaved People in Kentucky (SEEK) Project, a partnership between faculty in the University of Kentucky Libraries (UKL) and the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative (CKSI), housed in the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies (CIBS), combining subject expertise and the Libraries’ deep archive of historical Kentucky newspapers to finally bring these ads to light for research and instruction. Building on collaborations with the National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP) at the Library of Congress and the national Freedom on the Move (FOTM) project based at Cornell University, over the past two years the SEEK team has developed a student-focused evaluation and clipping workflow that has resulted in hundreds of ads seeking self-emancipated people, often called runaway ads, published in Kentucky newspapers being made available for analysis and research. This paper offers an overview of Kentucky’s role in the migrations of self-emancipated people and its documentation in newspapers of the day; archival concerns with digitized and microfilmed historical newspaper collections; best practices for involving undergraduate and graduate students in project development, including metadata organization and a web-based workflow process; and the development of pedagogical opportunities for students and researchers to learn more about this topic and to contribute.