Mellon Foundation grants $1.4 million to MSU for historic slavery database

What they're saying: "The early response to the Enslaved.org project has been overwhelmingly positive, but it also speaks to the great amount of work still to be done," said Dean Rehberger, principal investigator and director of Matrix, MSU's Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.

• “While we continue to digitize records, such as those that are handwritten, to preserve them, we know there is more to each person’s story,” Walter Hawthorne, project co-investigator, professor of African history and associate dean of academic and student affairs in MSU’s College of Social Science, said.

The big picture: The Mellon grant will help researchers expand the reach of the project by refining the data infrastructure, publishing more datasets and narrative stories and introducing new features for data visualizations.