French and Francophone Digital Humanities Projects

Tracks major cholera outbreaks in the Caribbean.

The website is designed to provide online access to both the French originals and the English translations of key primary sources dealing with the grain shortage faced by the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1789, which are found under the Translations menu. Alongside the French original, each translation is presented with a brief historical introduction to situate the reader in the time period and help understand how this particular pamphlet fits into the episode.

The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a highly interactive digital scholars lab for the collaborative research and study of pre-C20 Caribbean literature. The ECDA seeks to engage both scholars and students in a shared, critical study of the textual, material, and cultural histories of the Caribbean by providing them with innovative digital technologies and newly emerging discursive platforms for generating new knowledges of the Caribbean’s rich body of materials.

This website is a crossroads for literary fictions of the Haitian Revolution: texts composed as novels, short stories, novellas, short fictional sketches, poetry, and/or plays.

An Island Luminous is a site to help readers learn about Haiti’s history. Created by historian Adam M. Silvia and hosted online by Digital Library of the Caribbean, An Island Luminous combines rare books, manuscripts, and photos scanned by archives and libraries in Haiti and the United States with commentary by over one hundred (100) authors from universities around the world.

The Haitian Diaspora Oral History Digital Collection includes videos and outlines of oral history interviews conducted with individuals of Haitian ancestry that are well-renowned in the world of culture and the arts, education, community activism, civic leadership, and many professional organizations.

This site, produced by Duke’s Haiti Lab, is meant to serve as a guide and portal to online resources about Haiti, specifically historical materials relating to the country and writings by Haitian authors. It is geared towards providing maximum access to these resources to Haitian readers. It is a work in progress.

The division of early nineteenth-century Haiti into two separately governed states led to the creation of competing printing presses under Henry Christophe in the north and Alexandre Pétion in the south. Here, you can journey through the northern government of Haiti’s official newspapers and explore its yearly almanacs. Remnants of a robust culture of print, these rare documents, collected from archives across Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, are presented together and in full text for the first time.

Le Progressiste: organe du Parti Progressiste Martiniquais, is an influential weekly newspaper published by the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM), which was founded by Martiniquan poet and politician Aimé Césaire. The newspaper provides a fuller understanding of the PPM’s development and gives scholars insight into Césaire’s ideas, views, and concerns, as well as those of his fellow PPM members

This project started as a visual record of colonial and early-national ruins in Haiti, but it’s grown in both scope and depth.
It serves as a visual preservation of Haïtian historical, natural, and cultural sites. Where possible, links are provided to external documentation (such as ISPAN).

Chris Jones and Stephanie Curci developed Mapping the Haitian Revolution for use with their high school classroom. The project is now available in other languages (French, Kreyol, and Spanish) thanks to the team at CreoleTrans. "Primarily, its purpose is to help our students understand the complicated narrative of the Haitian Revolution across time and space. These students include high school seniors as well as tenth-grade students, who study a shorter unit on the Haitian Revolution. We also wanted to provide a resource for other teachers at the high-school level who might be looking for a collection of English-language materials to help create or buttress an existing unit on the Haitian Revolution."

The Marronnage in Saint Domingue project digitizes over 12,000 fugitive slave notices from Affiches Américaines, the principal newspaper of Haiti of the Saint Domingue colony (now Haiti) from 1766-1790.

The RSHHGG Lab is an interactive online index of over 90 years of the Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire, de Géographie et de Géologie, the official publication of Haiti’s oldest intellectual society that is still active today. By indexing the contents of the journal, the site aims to increase the impact of this important publication by facilitating the work of scholars of Haiti in the US, Haiti, and beyond. It is our sincere hope that this effort will foster collaboration and new partnerships by connecting scholars of Haiti from all levels and locales.

The following site contains six excerpts from primary source texts about various aspects of the Haitian Revolution written by French writers. The excerpt subjects vary widely, each revealing a different perspective of one of the more under-recognized world events. All texts are preceded by an introduction that provides context and background information to aid readers in their discovery of these important texts and contribute to a better understanding of the Haitian Revolution itself.
Our primary goal in providing a place where these excerpts are made readily available and translated is to begin to cultivate and create accessible academic documents surrounding the Haitian Revolution.

This database seeks to make known the rich and varied culture of public theatre that existed in the colony from 1764 to 1791 and to promote further research in this area.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that forcibly embarked over 10 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.