Mapping Slavery’s Attraction: A Case for an Autoethnographic Digital Humanities

Abstract

AbstractWhen utilizing digital methods to research social phenomena, such as slavery, how do we prevent re‐objectifying marginalized humans while reducing them, as a matter of course, to digital units and computational attributes? This essay proposes the meshing of an autoethnographic sensibility with digital humanities. I narrate a portion of my methodological and interpretative processes as extracted from a larger project, “Mapping Modernity’s Slavery,” which utilizes digital mapping methods to visualize and analyze the constitutive spatiality of modern tourism, representations of luxury, and the (en)slave(d) body in antebellum New Orleans. The project plots more than 100 points of sale of enslaved people, the addresses of the city’s major nineteenth‐century hotels, and their relative density and proximity. I also deep map descriptions of these sites as rendered within Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Francis and Theresa Pulszky’s White, Red, Black, both published in 1853. As a way to avoid the reproduction of the slavocracy’s dehumanizing techniques (i.e., the reduction of humans to tabulations in account books, catalogues, bills of sale, etc.), the paper foregrounds how being attuned to the embodied practice, phenomenology, and affect of manipulating archival materials within software platforms critically reshapes the questions asked of the research project. I propose a critical autoethnographic deep mapping to ameliorate the racial limitations and distortions at the intersection of the archive, the map, and the digital.