Remembering Kinfolk will be a new kind of database: one of remembrance.

As a database of remembrance, Remembering Kinfolk will be designed in partnership with descendant communities to hold oral histories, family photographs, written testimonies and other materials honoring enslaved ancestors. Remembering Kinfolk will thus challenge data’s association, within the context of slavery studies, with the quantitative violence of enslavers’ records, and resituate enslaved people within the relational and familial networks in which they lived and which—in memory—they remain.

While many databases (even those designed with care) replicate the logics and lies of enslavers—fictions contending that humanity has a price, and that relational identity was rendered null and void by the ledger book—Remembering Kinfolk will be reserved for data as testimony. Remembering Kinfolk will thus radically reshape and reclaim slavery’s archive.