Methods and Open Access
Methodologies
In August 2019 the Columbus Community Geography Center collaborated with the documentary film company Azilia Films on the Liberia Migration Project. Specifically students sought to identify the the decendents of the emigrants from the Lower Chattahoochee Valley who emigrated to Liberia in the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, students also developed maps and data to help place the story of this region's emigration into a broader context of the post-Civil War period. Using a variety of historical, geo-spatial, and digital humanities techniques we sought to locate decendents of graphical methods. From conventional and social media, geneology, mapping the last names of emigrant families using tax data, and OCR (optical character recognition) of nineteenth century emigration records to create maps locating the Liberian communities in which emigrants first inhabited. One of the central challenges of this project was connecting with the families of emgirants.
Finding Local Liberian Emigre Decendents
Students began with a conventional and social media campaign inviting the decendents of emigress to join the Liberian Migration History Harvest at two events in Columbus and Eufuala. We also included the names of all 100 families and their family members into Geneology software in hope that we might find connections to contemporary local residents. Of the 100 families to date we were only able to identify three families, two of which are still living in the region. We began to understand that memory of this historical event was more complex than we first imagined. Using geneology software we were able to identify at about 25% of emigres lived in the Chattahoochee Valley prior to emigration using a mix of documentation. It should be noted that census data was not helpful to our research as the 1860 census did not include the names of enslaved peoples, and the 100 emigrant families left for Liberia in 1867 and 1868, prior to the 1870 census. We took the last names of the emigrant families and searched contemporary tax records related to home ownership, and mapped the last names as well as creating a mailing list of potenrial family decendents who may, in the future, be mailed a flier encouraging them to find out more about the Liberia Migration Project.
Identifying Where People Came from and Where they Settled
In the second course, students accessed demographic data of all US emigrants to Liberia in 1867 and 1868. Using The African Repository, a publication of the American Colonialization Society, the organization who funded this large scale migration. We also created a table of data of all emigrants by state from the beginning of the ACS migration program until 1867.
, students we got names of Liberian emigrants through a website called HathiTrust. {Insert 'African Repository' Picture here} This website showed all the emigrants they documented coming from the United States traveling to Liberia. We looked at the 1860-1870 emigrants for our community project. Each year had different information to describe each person. The lists included number, name, age, profession, slave status, from the city, from the state, US port, ship name, and Liberian destination. We copied and pasted images of these lists into an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program so it could copy the lists onto Microsoft Excel.
OCR, Excel and GIS
While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology has been in use since 1930s, recent innovations in this technology allow us to digitalize data into a format ready to create a spreadsheet. We were fortunate in that we were using images of nineteenth century printed text already organized into tables that made OCR effective. However, we soon realized that OCR technology is fallible and students spent many hours learning how to review the data, carefully correcting it when scanning recogition was incomplete, reviewing each others data to catch any obvious errors. After organizing and cleaning the data when then added information that was not in table form in the original documents (location and dates of where folks set sail from and where they first established residency). Having created the data set for 2 years (1867 and 1868), we shared the data with our GIS (Geographic Information Systems) peer for mapping where all US emigrants were traveling from and where they first settled. While we used only the data related to origin of emigrant and the location of first settlement in Liberia, there is a rich source of other demographic data that maybe of interest to other reserachers and so we are sharing that data on this website.
In addition, we decided to collect and clean the data for a ten year period 1860 and 1870, and while were were not able to map this data in our 12-day Jan term we are sharing the data.
Fair Use, Creative Commons and Open Access
Where our data comes from and how we can use this data.
The source of our data is the The African Repository which is part of the Hathi Trust Digital Library. According to HathiTrust's review related to copyright. Copyright: "Volumes that are published in the US prior to 1925, published in Canada or Australia before 1900, or published elsewhere before 1880, as well as most US federal government documents are treated as public domain. In addition, volumes published outside the US from 1880 through 1924 are treated as public domain for users accessing the volumes from US IP addresses; however, they are treated as in-copyright for users that come from non-US IP addresses." The HathiTrust, n.d. Copyright. https://www.hathitrust.org/copyright accessed 2.3.2020
- The African Respository is in the public domain.
Fair Use
HathiTrust has a partnership with 100 reserach libraries to digitize the concets to support research by scholars, legal research, use by politicains, anti-plagarism software, amongst other uses. Searchable databases, text and data mining, and digital humanities are permitted by law through fair use.
NOTE: We did not use robots to locate each month's emigration data, though we realize that this is certainly a possibility.