Internet Reviews

Joni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost

Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, email: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, email: cdrost@willamette.edu

Globalethics. Access: https://www.globethics.net/.

Globalethics, whose head office is located in Geneva, Switzerland, comprises an open library aimed at providing quality resources in applied ethics, education, and religious studies. These resources are culled from open access repositories, especially those from the Global South (areas outside of North America and Europe). Examples of material available in ethics, education, and religious studies include Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Online Journal of Health Studies, Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, Transformation in Higher Education, Indonesian Journal of Islam and Muslim Societies, and Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies.

Globalethics also maintains a robust publication program. As with many open access publishers, Globalethics charges its authors a publication contribution. In return, it provides editorial assistance and marking services. The website provides no information on the pre-publication review process. Most of the publications are written in English, but some of them are available only in Chinese or French. As part of its “Education Ethics Series,” for example, Globalethics has published Leadership with Integrity: Higher Education from Vocation to Funding, edited by Christopher Sückelberger, Joseph Galgalo, and Samuel Kobia (2021) and Higher Education in Crisis: Sustaining Quality Assurance and Innovation in Research Through Applied Ethics, edited by Ikechukwu J. Ani and Obiora F. Ike (2019). These studies may not be suited for undergraduate populations, although graduate students in a variety of disciplines may find them useful. All but the most recent publications can be downloaded free of charge.

In addition to its publication platform, Globalethics provides training modules in ethics for institutions, teachers, students, and professions. These modules could be used by institutions seeking to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusivity voices into their ethics training. The ethical training for students offers a general introduction to ethics for first-year students.

Those who are interested in ethics in higher education will find this site valuable. —Wendell G. Johnson, Northern Illinois University, wjohnso1@niu.edu

The Marshall Project. Access: https://www.themarshallproject.org.

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization named as a tribute to former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. It “seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.” Former newspaper reporter Neil Barsky founded The Marshall Project in 2015. Both the founding editor-in-chief, Bill Keller, and the current editor-in-chief, Susan Chira, each had previously worked for more than 35 years at The New York Times in various roles, including executive editor.

The focus of this journalism is reform. A letter from the founder on the site states: “Being nonpartisan is not the same as being neutral. We approach the issue with the view—shared by a growing number of conservatives and liberals—that our system needs serious rethinking.”

The homepage prominently features three recent stories. From the navigation bar, users can select a project or browse by topic. The search consists of a single box without options for narrowing or sorting results. Email newsletters serve as a primary method for interacting with the site’s content. By clicking “subscribe,” users are introduced to five different emails they can sign up to receive on a regular basis, including a daily roundup of criminal justice news from around the web and a weekly summary of The Marshall Project’s stories.

Resources such as this may become a more common access point for journalism as we continue to see the closure of local news outlets. The Marshall Project, funded by foundations and individual donors, sees itself as being “in a position to fill the gap” by partnering with local news outlets or opening new offices in cities with an identified need.

Specifically for courses that have a culminating research assignment, signing up to regularly receive The Marshall Project content in their email inbox could help students develop their individual research topic over the course of the semester. This resource may also be valuable in connecting students to first-person accounts. The “Life Inside” series, which is also available as a weekly email, features essays from people who live and work in the criminal justice system. The Marshall Project site may be of interest to students in journalism, criminal justice, or legal studies.—Lucy Rosenbloom, Loyola University-New Orleans, lrosen@loyno.edu

SlaveVoyages. Access: https://www.slavevoyages.org/.

The new version of SlaveVoyages, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, can help students and scholars “explore the dispersal of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic World.” Researchers can find out how many slaves were transported on Danish ships from the Gold Coast of Africa to the Danish West Indies or access statistics on the number of Africans brought from South America to the Caribbean.

Building on 40 years of archival research and database development, Emory University launched the first version of SlaveVoyages in 2008. From 2015 to 2018, the whole site was re-coded and given a new user interfaces supported by NEH grants to Emory, the University of California-Irvine, and the University of California-Santa Cruz. As of April 2021, Rice University is now hosting the site as part of a consortium of eight institutions.

The core database covers 36,000 Trans-Atlantic Slave voyages that forcibly sent more than 10 million Africans to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. It has been supplemented by a new database of more than 11,000 Intra-American Slave Voyages and an African Names database of 92,000 Africans who were captives found on 2,000 vessels condemned for slave trafficking. Essays, maps, animations, timelines, and images supplement the datasets. Although intended for scholars, lesson plans have been included for grades 6 through 12.

Both voyage databases can be searched by year, ship, nation, owner, captain, number of enslaved people per voyage, itinerary, and more. Each search can be viewed as tables, data visualization, timeline, maps, and timelapse animation. The statistics are easily downloaded. Users may contribute to the database, and each dataset has clear user instructions. The African Names database can be searched by name, age, height, sex, ship name, arrival, disembarkation, and links to the African Origins database, which should let users hear the names pronounced and identify the likely ethno-linguistic origin of an individual’s name. However, the African Origins site expired in June 2021.

Scholars at Emory would like to see the focus of the site change from maritime transportation to people, both the enslaved and those organizing the slave trade. The Legacies of British Slave Ownership site at University College London provides a good model for this, which could be expanded to all the countries listed in the SlaveVoyages datasets. For scholars and students alike, SlaveVoyages is an excellent resource for Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave voyage research.—Doreen Simonsen, Willamette University, dsimonse@willamette.edu