AI Unearths Untold Stories

Historians Jane Landers and Daniel Genkins leverage artificial intelligence and computer science techniques to scan through thousands of historical documents to form the Slave Societies Digital Archive, the world’s largest collection of historical records of Africans in the Atlantic World.

We’re not just constructing single lives in isolation. We’re reconstructing communities.
Daniel Genkins
Mellon assistant professor of history and digital humanities

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Jane Landers

Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt professor of history and Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive

Jane Landers is a historian specializing in the history of Africans and their descendants in Colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World. Landers directs the Slave Societies Digital Archive hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt. The SSDA preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to slavery in the Atlantic World.

Learn more about Jane Landers

Daniel Genkins

Mellon assistant professor of history and digital humanities and executive director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive

Daniel Genkins is an assistant professor of history and digital humanities. He also conducted his graduate studies in history, digital humanities and data science at Vanderbilt. Toward the end of his graduate student career, he began working on the Slave Societies Digital Archive, where he is now the executive director.

Learn more about Daniel Genkins
The Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA)

Landers added to UNESCO slave route committee

Vanderbilt libraries add image-based research to discovery agenda

Vanderbilt joins peer group studying legacies of slavery and racial injustice

Inside the Data Science Institute: Slave Societies Digital Archive

Wond’ry exhibit takes digital humanities into three dimensions

Slave records digital archive receives ACLS Extension Grant

The SSDA in the News

Tennessean: Slave Societies Digital Archive: What Vanderbilt’s new archive means for African history (July 1, 2022)

The Conversation: Building a digital archive for decaying paper documents, preserving centuries of records about enslaved people (January 6, 2020)

Smithsonian Magazine: A Massive New Database Will Connect Billions of Historic Records to Tell the Full Story of American Slavery (January 2020)

HuffPost: Changing Cuba And The Race To Save The Past (August 15, 2016)
Justin Jones is a second-year Ph.D. student working under the direction of Jane Landers and Brandon Byrd. His research interests include migration, refugees, slavery and the law associated with the Haitian Revolution. Jones looks at how these factors created and maintained connections of the U.S., the Caribbean and South America.

Jones is also very interested in digital humanities, particularly the use of GIS for tracking migrations. His research in the SSDA is focused on records of Fort Mose, the first free Black settlement in Florida.

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