I analyzed “Beyond the Vale: Visualizing Slavery in Craven County, North Carolina” by Marissa Kinsey. Ms. Kinsey, using historical data on the enslaved population of the county during the antebellum period, created pie charts, bar graphs, and other charts that illustrated and compared various facets of slave-life in the county at the time of the 1860 Census.

            The form of the project impacts the audience it serves in very meaningful and specific ways. The visual representations, by displaying in a visual manner stark contrasts, lay bare the brutality that was chattel slavery. In a bar graph that depicts the numbers of slaves owned per slave master vs. the number of dwellings provided, the blue bars depicting the number of slaves dwarfs the red bars that depict the number of dwellings provided, allowing viewers to imagine the type of cramped and unlivable types of living situations many slaves had to endure. In a bar graph depicting the number of slaves owned by each slave-owner, we see visually that 4 slave-owners owned more slaves than about 18 other slave-owners combined, emphasizing the fact that humans were viewed as mere property to be purchased to the most affluent purchaser. Another web-chart shows the interconnectedness of slaveholding families with not only each other, but of non-slaveholding families through intermarriage, showing perhaps visual proof of how widespread support for the peculiar institution was maintained.

            What these visual representations do for the meaning of the project is provide a foundation, a visceral one at that, for the empirical truths of slave life in the county at that particular time. Ms. Kinsey sought to provide a more balanced view of the truth about slave life in the county with the use of hard data to balance out the biased local narratives that have historically received primacy. Though hard data enables Ms. Kinsey’s bar graphs and pie charts to exist, they provide the reader with not only the truth about slave life but also a new emotional understanding of its prominence and inhumanity.