The best part of my job is looking through the new datasets submitted to DataShare, our open-access data repository. One of the first datasets that gripped me was; Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870.

This dataset is really cool because as well as being a valuable resource for future research projects, it’s extremely interesting to read, even as someone who doesn’t know anything about historical research. This readability is what makes humanities dataset submissions so fun to process.

This dataset summarises debates on chattel slavery and abolition by two of the University’s debating societies during roughly the last hundred official years of the Transatlantic slave trade. It includes motions and outcomes of the debates, as well as information about the people participating and the positions they took.

It’s easy to tell ourselves that people in the past caused unimaginable harm because they didn’t know any better. Maybe this impulse is a form of self-preservation, a way to deny our ancestors’ agency to protect them – and ourselves – from blame. The dataset reminds us that even at the height of the slave trade there were many people publicly voicing their opposition. The data give us some insight into how these men understood their own complicity in slavery and their responsibility in upholding or abolishing it.

It’s interesting to see, for example, that some debate outcomes were pro-abolition, but against immediate abolition. Or how a debate on whether it would be sound policy to abolish the African slave trade had a unanimously pro-abolition outcome in 1792, yet full emancipation didn’t come for over forty years.

The dataset comes from The Decolonised Transformations Project which aims to take a critical look at the University’s complicity and investment in slavery and colonialism, confront the legacies of these choices, and make concrete recommendations to address present-day structural racism. The project is a great example of how Humanities research can be translated into a wide array of resources to maximise its utility and reach. As well as traditional outputs like publications and reports, the research team has published datasets, done podcasts, and held workshops and talks for the wider community.

Decolonised Transformations – Confronting the University’s Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism

The datasets have been downloaded multiple times since they were shared in November, so I’m sure other people are finding this data as interesting as I am.

Evelyn Williams
Research Data Support Assistant