K4BL is developing vocabulary for describing a research and workflow that centers Black life and is responsive to demands from descended and diasporic Black community to treat documents with individuals of African descent with an ethic of care. At times, that means we have moved away from academic and editorial verbiage when describing the materials under our charge and our editorial process. As a team, we have made it a priority to be transparent with the Keywords Community Circle about all aspects of the project. This has meant generating a shared vocabulary for how to discuss the project, our enagement with the documents, our commitments, our community practices (internal and external), and our goals. Below is a glossary of terms that are in common usage among team members and the members of the Keywords Community Circle.
See also the senior slavery scholar crowd-sourced document (an initiative led by Dr. Pier Gabrielle Foreman) for more information about best practices when describing enslaved Black people in Africa and the Americas: Writing About Slavery? Teaching About Slavery? Crowd-sourced document
- Descendant(s): "A descendant community can include those whose ancestors were enslaved not only at aparticular site, but also throughout the surrounding region, reflecting the fact that family ties often crossed plantation boundaries. A descendant community can also welcome those who feel connected to the work the institution is doing, whether or not they know of a genealogical connection." "Engaging Communtiies in the Interpretation of Slavery at Museums and Historic Sites: A Rubric of Best Practices" established by the National Summit on Teaching Slavery V 1.o - 10.25.18
- Keywords: We define keywords as the simplest encapsulation of a topic that we have identified as salient to Black life in the colonial archive. We use keywords to “designate collective thoughts, ideas, arguments, and experiences that might otherwise stand alone or be quickly subsumed” within the milieu of documentation in slavery’s archive. In digital form, keywords, like hashtags, also create “a searchable shortcut that can link people and ideas together.”
- Document: A single manuscript page of text. We discovered over the planning grant period that to accurately track the labor involved in generating abstracts, transcriptions, and translations, we needed to count by document pages, not by document folios (whether court cases or other kinds of archival material) because of the differences in French and Spanish practices of archival collection. The archive of French documentation is strictly chronological and a given story might span multiple document pages, folios, and dates, but by entered in and therfore appear in different places in the archive. In contrast, Spanish officials bundled instances and events together into legajos, generating massive bundles of material that contain as many as two hundred or four hundred document pages from across time and space, but related to a single individual, case, or legal concern, into one massive folio. Tracking our progress by document pages captures these differences.
- Stories: 1. Events described in a single or series of manuscript document pages. 2. A collection of documents related to a single person, topic or event such as a court case, petition, or birth record. Stories may include multiple document types and documents from across time and space. Stories was chosen as a robust and narrative term that centers the historical agency and action of the actors, Black and non-Black, involved in the events being described over the document as an artifact. This term also acknowledges that the material under study is often legal (“court cases”), but not always and not indefinitely as the edition expands to encompass other kinds of documents (i.e. sacramental, epistolary).
- Legajos: Spanish officials bundled instances and events together into legajos, generating massive bundles of material that contain as many as two hundred or four hundred document pages from across time and space, but related to a single individual, case, or legal concern, into one massive folio.
- Senior (Member): A team member who has been with the project at least two years and attended one summer workshop.
- Associate (Member): A team member who has been with the project at least one year and attended one summer workshop.
- Assistant (Member): A team member who has been with the project for any duration with a leadership role in an aspect of the project (Digital, Community, 2T, Editorial); includes a leadership role on the Research Team co-visioning the digital edition.