Kartikay Chadha, Dr. Martha Laldy

"The Decoding Origins research aims 1) to design new visual paradigms, through the collection, analyses and visualisation of data from 19th century slave manumission records and the Liberated Africans Registers, for the reconstruction of lost African identities; 2) to understand how visual data collection, curation, visualisation and analyses might create new knowledge that could enable the discovery of African identities. The project’s hypothesis is based on the rich history of applying permanent body marks, most usually in the form of scarification and tattoos, to represent individual’s memberships in African kin groups and local societies. The Language of Marks is a collaborative user-friendly web-tool for researchers and scholars working in the field of West African Studies, primarily focused to explore, visualize, transcribe and analyze, data containing body marks. The web-portal is supported by a relational database, populated with over 12,000 entries, recorded in The Registers of Liberated Africans, along with downloadable digital images of The Registers. The portal enables a scale-able organization of rich, high volume data that supports improved search, extraction, and visualization of information. Moreover, the database structure is not limited to scarification records, and can be used by others investigating the trans-Atlantic slave trade, searching for voyages, biographies, ethnicities, religions etc. The next phase of the project will include quantitatively and qualitatively analyses of the curated data by training and testing Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and creating 2D/3D visualization models. This will enable researchers to trace origins and identities, and to memorialize individuated aesthetic biographies of enslaved persons. "