Freedmen's Bureau Project
In Brief
The Mindswap group is working with a group from Howard University to make documents from the Freedmen's Bureau available via the Semantic Web. These documents are being digitally imaged from microfilm held by the National Archives and Records Administration. The teams from Mindswap and Howard University are working together to customize tools and develop ontologies that will allow scholars, students, genealogists, and other enquiring minds to access the wealth of information explicitly and implicitly encoded in the letters, forms, and other documents generated and received by the Freedmen's Bureau.
Project Files
Freedmen's Bureau Document Images
These are jpg images that were made from microfilm. Since they are third-generation formats of documents that are over 100 years old, they can be hard to read. The files linked below are quite large, and the whole image will not display on your screen unless you zoom out a bit. Even these large files are only 25%-50% of the size and resolution we use to be able to read the text.| Letters | Index of Names | Government Aid Form |
| Letter 1 Letter 2 Letter 3, pg 1 Letter 3, pg 2 |
Index, pg 1 Index, pg 2 Index, pg 3 Index, pg 4 |
Aid Form, pg 1 Aid Form, pg 2 Aid Form, pg 3 Aid Form, pg 5 |
Ontologies
- Document Ontology
- A brief ontology that describes the types and properties of documents in this collection. Last update: 25 April 2003.
- Document Topics Ontology
- An ontology that allows for the description of broad document topics and of named entities in Freedmen's Bureau documents.
- Slave Ontology
- Created by Dr. Harry Keeling of Howard University, this is a detailed and in-depth ontology of classes, properties and instances related to slavery and slave life.
