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I’d like to discuss best practices in designing databases for humanities research. I don’t mean software that creates or depends on databases, like Omeka or WordPress for public presentation. I mean more designing databases for research in the history. I’d like to compile a group of databases used for historical analysis, and dissect them to see how they work. How do they structure and normalize data? How is the data coded? What formats are best? How can databases be made publicly available? How was the data compiled and entered? What uses can be found for databases beyond their original purpose?

To that end, here are a few examples of historical databases that I know of off-hand. I’d be glad for more examples, before or during this session.

• Ariela Gross, database appendix to Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• Buddhist Authority Database Project
• This I Believe