Oceans

During my sophomore year at Rice Daniel Domingues da Silva, a history professor, approached me with an opportunity to work on a very exciting digital humanities project called Between Oceans and Continents, an effort to create an online source bringing together information on almost 14,000 enslaved Africans registered in Mozambique during the second half of the nineteenth century. The site was to host essays on the history of the Portuguese slave trade in Mozambique and a digitized copy of the eight surviving registers. Much of the site was already in place, and I was brought on to design and develop interactive charts to visualize and better understand the incredibly rich and dense dataset.

This was an amazing opportunity. I used it as a chance to teach myself D3.js, a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data, and built out a custom histogram, pie chat, bubble map, and filtering panel. One of my favorite features to work on, and in my mind the signature feature of our site, is Round Trip Filtering, a system that allowed interactions with the filter panel to dynamically update our visualizations, and interactions with the visualizations would in turn refilter the data. This allows for extremely intuitive exploration of our massive dataset. For instance: a user could set up an interesting inspection on the pie-chart though the filter panel, then geographically constrict the results simply with a click on the map. Round Trip Filtering allows users to quickly crawl through our dataset and gain a deep understanding about the intersections of age, gender, geography, and occupation (among other fields) for the enslaved Africans. These types powerful tools are not common in the humanities, and I am extremely proud of the work did to bring them to Between Oceans and Continents.

After about a year working with the project, I expanded my project to include a rewrite of the entire website. Previously the site was using WordPress, and when I became aware that server costs were disproportionate to what I believed they should be I proposed we rewrite the site to be entirely static and switch to a new host. I rewrote the site using Jekyll and after much work we reached feature parity with a site orders of magnitude smaller.

I had an amazing time working on this project and am very happy with the work I produced. While it was not very similar to the type of work I was previously doing it was a great opportunity to go outside of my comfort zone, and I was especially happy to have the chance to work on something related to global racial justice. I hope you all check it out.