W. Caleb McDaniel writes:

“Every three minutes, that code printed A slave was just sold to the screen—a subtle reminder of the Damoclean sword that hung over every cornpatch, Sunday wage, or home that an enslaved man or woman had won.

“Reflecting on that experiment after the class, I started to wonder about a similar experiment using social media. In a previous collaboration with my digital history students, I had built a “Twitter bot” called @TexasRunawayAds, which automatically tweets an excerpt from a runaway slave advertisement about twice a day. By slightly modifying the script for that bot, could I create a new Twitter bot to emulate the shell script above?

“The result of those musings is @Every3Minutes, which tweets a reminder of an antebellum slave sale once every three minutes…”

Read it all: Slave Sales on Twitter | W. Caleb McDaniel

Recently discussed in Week 3: Race and Black Codes (Main Thread) — CCS Working Group 2018 co-led by Jessica Marie Johnson, Safiya Noble, and Mark Anthony Neal.