Research Methodology

The Portal to the Black Experience is designed as a ‘relational’ index, meaning: it generates a list of the names of people who are related to or share personal attributes with others with respect to time, place, occupation, institutional affliliation, gender, and race. A results list of names is produced by a user through a series of faceted searches, which access information about particular individuals, relationships and groups. For social historians this methodology is of considerable use, since it provides the means for prospographical study.* Perhaps the greatest and most recognizeable prosopographical feature of this portal is that it is comprised almost entirely of men and women of African descent, who represent the collective biography of the Black experience.

The methodology, however, is not an end in itself. The methodology, applied to facilitating further research or to locating recreational reading and audio/visual materials, is meant to lead users to a pragmatic ends, namely to enable them to move rapidly from their results list of names to discovering and obtaining materials that are by or about a specific person belonging to their results list.

*Prosopography is the study of groups; it seeks to understand history through collective biography rather than through focus on the great man or institution.