Black Digital Humanities scholars have often grappled with the contradiction that digitizing slavery’s archives, in the words of historian Jessica Marie Johnson, “threatens to replicate the death work of the slave ship register,” re-enacting the commodification of the people whose lives and histories they seek to name (2018). Well aware of this conversation, I was apprehensive when I hired undergraduate research assistants (RAs) in the summer of 2025 to help me transcribe records from the US Slave Claims Commissions. The records themselves represented the harms of slavery in a critical moment of emancipation, recording Border State enslavers’ claims for compensation for enslaved people freed when they enlisted in the US army during the Civil War. They certainly commodified the soldiers and continued to classify freed soldiers as “slaves” despite the law that freed them.  

Project Considerations

At this stage of the project, students would almost exclusively transcribe data from photos of original archival materials into spreadsheets. We couldn’t yet transform the data to reflect the ways that Black soldiers and actors shaped the data, as scholars have called for, to mitigate some of these ethical concerns. I wondered: How could I guide students in transcribing the records as they were written without treating the data like “independent and objective statistical fact” that continued to commodify Black people? (Johnson 2018) 

In this post, I start from that space of unease and reflect on what my RAs, collaborator Cora Wigger, and I accomplished last summer with the data-based transcription project. I tried to follow an ethos of harm reduction, knowing that I am just as constricted by my positionality as a white historian at a predominantly white institution. When I hired them, I promised my RAs training in not only reading and transcribing the documents, but also support and training in working with data related to traumatic histories.  

Scholars such as Johnson (2018) and Kim Gallon (2016) have held that supporting researchers as they work with data related to the history of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade is required methodological practice in the Black Digital Humanities, so I structured the project to help my RAs build up to this conversation. Throughout the summer, students moved from thinking about their transcription work in what I’ll describe as three stages: accuracy, accessibility, and, finally, ethics. 

Accuracy 

From the start, I strived to create a space open to conversation and questions from students so that their participation shaped the transcription process. In stage 1, I focused on training students to read and to transcribe the archival materials directly into Google Sheets. This required identifying and building students’ skills in reading nineteenth-century cursive and using the Sheets interface. Students first worked with the same document, then reviewed each other’s work in a subsequent meeting. This activity set the tone for collaboration and invited them to ask questions of the group. After, they began to transcribe on their own, and we reconvened in weekly meetings to ask questions and review the material. 

From this first stage of onboarding, students began to prioritize transcription accuracy. I emphasized that they needed to ask questions or verify transcriptions when they were uncertain, and we worked together in our meetings to answer each other’s questions. I explained that it was especially important to standardize the spelling of names, places, and other descriptors in order to search for people or places in the data in the future, and we standardized abbreviations and coding for uncertainty around words and letters. Students exhibited cautiousness around their interpretations of the clerk’s handwriting. This was good practice, but I worried that the emphasis on accuracy distracted from the people in the data. 

Accessibility 

It was time for stage 2. I asked the RAs to read Johnson’s “Markup Bodies,” which as the students’ subsequent blog posts indicate, changed the tone of the work. Students began to see transcription work as an issue of accessibility and accuracy. After we broke down the argument of “Markup Bodies,” I asked them if the work we were doing accomplished the goals and challenges that Johnson set for historians of slavery. We were honest with each other: not exactly, they said. It depends. They noted that, at this stage of the project, we weren’t doing much more than transcribing the data. In many ways, that meant reinscribing the process of commodification that the soldiers themselves experienced when the government promised to pay their enslavers for them.  

But, the students asked: Who is this data for? If this work would be open access, it had the potential to contribute to historical research and genealogy and descendent engagement. If we changed some of the government’s language in the dataset, such as referring to the enlisted men as soldiers instead of slaves, then we could begin to align with Johnson’s methodologies. As Mia Arango wrote, “Transcription isn’t just a task of accuracy; it’s about responsibility and care” (2025). Johnson’s article helped students refocus on accuracy as a form of care, not a binary of right or wrong. By interpreting the documents with care, Elon Brown concluded, we could recognize and reveal new stories of Black soldiers in the Civil War (2026). 

Ethics 

In stage 3, conversations about accessibility led to conversations about ethics and positionality. If we weren’t in line with Johnson yet, I asked, what could we do? We read ethics statements and project descriptions from other projects: Enslaved.org, Kinfolkology, On These Grounds, and LifexCode. Although we weren’t yet at a dissemination stage, the students emphasized that we should be mission driven. We could create a mission statement to keep us grounded, remind people of the history of the documents, and apply ethics to the transcriptions as well as to labor practices by advertising psychological services to researchers working with difficult histories. (In a future post, I’ll write more about the ethics statement we generated.)  

We also had a conversation about what it meant to work with descendants and genealogists, and how to engage descendant perspectives in different ways, from community outreach to reading first-hand accounts of descendants, such as works like Reclamation (White 2021). Cora helped us relate these conversations about ethics to ourselves by guiding us in creating our own positionality statements to think about what influences how we each interpret the documents. As Daisy Martinez-Jimenez reflected, the activity helps students “be more curious about the intent, audience, and goals around data” and “how our perspectives influenced the transcription choices we made” (2026). 

Final Reflections 

Reading the blog posts written by the five RAs was one of the most rewarding experiences in my time as junior faculty, because they showed me how efforts to support Black Digital Humanities research could be transformative for students’ understanding of Black history and data. The RAs reminded me of the importance of teaching complex history—particularly African American history—with primary sources. As my students routinely said, each data point represented a person’s moment of emancipation, a significant moment in their life.  

The RAs consistently articulated that each freed person and the enormity of that moment was important and worthy of recording for themselves, and that we had a responsibility to share the data while interrogating the data, our goals, and our intentions. My experience working with them will inevitably shape the project’s next steps and continue to inform how I teach about Black history and data.   

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References 

Arango, Mia. 2025. “Translating the Past: Reflections from Behind the Ledger.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog), Elon University. October 28, 2025. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/translating-the-past-reflections-from-behind-the-ledger/.

Brown, Elon. 2025. “More than Data.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog), Elon University. January 6, 2026. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/more-than-data.

Enslaved.org. 2025. “Statement of Ethics.” Revised February 14. https://enslaved.org/statementofEthics/ 

Gallon, Kim. 2016. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963761. 

Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2018. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36 (4): 57-79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658 

LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure. n.d. “About.” Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.lifexcode.org/about. 

Martinez-Jiminez, Daisy. 2025. “Preserving Human Experiences: Data and Ethics.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog). Elon University. November 18, 2025. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/preserving-human-experiences-data-and-ethics/. 

On These Grounds. n.d. “Ethical Commitments.” Accessed February 16, 2026. https://onthesegrounds.org/s/OTG/page/ethical-commitments. 

White, Gayle Jessup. 2021. Reclamation: Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy. HarperCollins. 

Williams, Jennie K. n.d. “Digital Defragmentation of Slavery’s Archive.” Kinfolkology.org. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.kinfolkology.org/on-digital-defragmentation. 

Williams, Jennie K. n.d. “On Data & Reckoning.” Kinfolkology.org. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.kinfolkology.org/on-data-reckoning. 

Williams, Jennie K. n.d. “On Kinship, Data & Descendant Engagement.” Kinfolkology.org. Accessed February 16, 2026. https://www.kinfolkology.org/on-kinship-data-descendant-engagement. 

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About the Author 

Amanda Laury Kleintop is an assistant professor of history and a 2025–2027 CEL Scholar. She specializes in the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, and emancipation. Her book, Counting the Costs of Freedom (2025), explores debates about compensating former enslavers in the US and profitmaking in slavery. It inspired her historical data and digital humanities project on African American soldiers in the Border States. 

How to Cite This Post 

Kleintop, Amanda Laury. 2026. “Teaching with Data & Care in the Digital Humanities.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog). Elon University. March 24, 2026. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/teaching-with-data-care-in-the-digital-humanities/.