The BlackItaly database is open research data. This page states the licence under which you may reuse it, how to cite it and how to read it programmatically.

Licence

The data of the database (the records of persons, networks and places, with their relations) are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence: you may copy, redistribute and adapt them, also for commercial purposes, provided you credit the source. The texts of the site pages and the images remain subject to the rights stated case by case. The reuse of data concerning identifiable persons remains subject to the Code of conduct for processing for historical research purposes recalled at the entrance of the site.

How to cite

The database: BlackItaly. The Italian Peninsula and the Atlantic Slavery: a Forgotten History, database, Fondazione Bruno Kessler – Italian-German Historical Institute, Trento, https://blackitaly.fbk.eu (accessed day/month/year).

A single record: title of the record, in BlackItaly, address of the record. For example: “La Chiapella Geronimo”, in BlackItaly, https://blackitaly.fbk.eu/s/eng/item/748.

API

The site is built with Omeka S and exposes its REST API, read-only and without registration, at https://blackitaly.fbk.eu/api. Responses are JSON-LD (the context is at /api-context); results are paginated with the page and per_page parameters. Some examples:

• all the persons of the database: /api/items?item_set_id=86&resource_class_id=94
• one record: /api/items/748
• the networks: /api/items?item_set_id=1204
• the persons of a network (here 1212): /api/items?property[0][property]=298&property[0][type]=res&property[0][text]=1212
• full-text search: /api/items?fulltext_search=Grillo
• the map markers: /api/mapping_features
• BlackItaly's own fields: /api/properties?vocabulary_prefix=blackitaly (vocabulary https://blackitaly.fbk.eu/blackitaly/)

API documentation: omeka.org/s/docs/developer/api.

What is excluded

The API returns public data only. The working notes of the research group, the records still under review and, until January 2027, the records of ships and voyages are not accessible. The database documents the people of the Italian peninsula involved in the Atlantic slave trade as merchants, financiers, shipowners, captains and owners; it does not hold records on enslaved people, who appear only where the sources name them next to those who held them in slavery.

Downloading the whole database

A complete copy of the database (CSV and JSON-LD), with a DOI fixing its version, will be deposited in an open repository at each release; the first deposit is being prepared. Meanwhile the data can be extracted through the API.

Contact

Reports, corrections and requests about data reuse: fmorelli@fbk.eu.