Slaves were brought to America in tens of thousands of individual sailing voyages across the Atlantic Ocean. Emory University had vast information on 35,000 of these voyages that it wished to share with scholars, teachers and the general public.
The challenge: How to make the wealth of maps, photographs, records and other data easy for scholars, students and others to access.
In seeking the answer to that challenge, Emory turned to Resonance Principal Kathleen Turaski to help conceptualize and design a remarkable Web site, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Kathleen provided a mix of consulting and design to help guide Emory’s Digital Innovations team from the project kick-off all the way through the site design stage.
Over a period spanning 18 months, Kathleen:
- helped shape the project parameters in its earliest days, providing counsel on how to create a single seamless experience for scholars and the public alike
- supported efforts to develop an architecture that would aggregate dozens of search variables into categories and subcategories
- recommended several ways to accommodate results from searches, from simple tables to spreadsheets to customizable maps
- created a flexible visual design for the site to allow for easy expansion to accommodate new information (even when the final information was still undetermined)
- designed the Voyages logo and navigation style
After two years of development, Voyages launched in December 2008 at a conference of international scholars. The gathering marked the bicentennial of the end of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Nearly 8,000 visitors explored the site on its first day, with each visitor looking at an average of 23 pages.
"Kathleen’s contributions to this project and her interactions with the team were always professional –and a pleasure,” says Liz Milewicz, who managed the project for Emory. “I'm glad we had the opportunity to work with her.”
Renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates, writer and producer of the PBS documentary "African American Lives," credits the Voyages site with shedding important light on the hidden history of 12.5 million slaves.
"The greatest mystery in the history of the West, I believe, has always been the Africans who were enslaved and shipped to the New World," Dr. Gates said. "Their ancestries, their identities, their stories were lost in the ships that carried them across the Atlantic. The multi-decade and collaborative project that brought us [the Voyages] site has done more to reverse the Middle Passage than any other single act of scholarship possibly could."
