We are pleased to invite you to a panel marking the completion of EAP1531, a British Library Endangered Archives Project that digitised and catalogued two endangered archival collections from the Archivo Histórico de Antioquia (1608–1750) in Colombia, now freely accessible online here: https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1531
Speakers:
Prof Diana Paton, Project Director and William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh
MA Whiston Pérez Cassiani, Project Cataloguer Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Dr Bethan Fisk, Project Associate Director, Senior Lecturer in Colonial Latin American History at the University of Bristol
Dr Paola Vargas Arana, Project Associate Director, Research Associate in African History at the University of Manchester
Moderator:
Prof Steven Pierce, Professor of Modern African History at the University of Manchester
Summary: This event introduces a major new digital corpus of over 100,000 early modern records documenting inheritance, property, labour, and legal transactions in colonial Colombia. The collections contain rare traces of African and Afro-descendant lives — including names, origins, details of the Middle Passage, physical descriptions, legal claims, and acts of resistance — alongside materials on mining economies, slavery, elite capital accumulation, and everyday juridical life. Speakers will discuss cataloguing practices, ethics, and power–knowledge relations in Digital Humanities projects, the recovery of marginalised subjects in historical archives, and the broader methodological questions about the ethical stakes of digital access and research with colonial sources.
We look forward to seeing you.
