Phrasing Insurrection: A Computational Study of the Grammars of Collective Enslaved Resistance Published in the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette between 1732 and 1775

Table of Contents

• About the author
• Project Description
• Why Digital History?
• Methodology and Data
• Tools and Resources

This study explores how digital methods like text mining and computational corpus linguistics can inform new research questions about white colonial conceptions of collective enslaved resistance in the eighteenth century. It calls for interdisciplinary approaches to critically examine how language, like numeracy, reinforced hereditary racial slavery in early American history.

“Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other—and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him. People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.)”
— James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979)