DAACS
Jillian was hired by Fraser Neiman, Director of Archaeology at Monticello, in 2000 to design and build what was initially called the “Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery,” a pioneering experiment, funded by the Mellon Foundation, in the use of web technologies to facilitate collaboration, data sharing, and comparative analysis in the discipline of archaeology.
Working in collaboration with colleagues in the Monticello Archaeology Department and with scores of archaeologists and historians at the forefront of research on slavery in the Chesapeake, Jillian led the development of classification and measurement protocols, data structures, their instantiation in a SQL-Server database, and a public-facing website with a point-and-click interface to allow users to query the database and download data for further analysis. The launch of a functioning website with data from archaeological sites at Monticello and in the Williamsburg area in 2004 signaled the success of the experiment.
Building on that success with additional Mellon funding, Jillian led the expansion of the archive and its network of collaborating scholars into the Carolinas and the Caribbean. DAACS became the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.
In 2007, Jillian worked with Fraser to create the DAACS Caribbean Initiative, a long-term research project, based on collaboration with archaeologists and historians associated with the University of the West Indies at Mona, to understand how villages that were home to enslaved laborers on Jamaica, Nevis, and St. Kitts changed over time and space.
In 2013 she and Fraser launched the DAACS Research Consortium. Jillian oversaw the development of DAACS’s current open-source PostgreSQL database and Ruby on Rails frontend, in collaboration with the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and Convoy. The new open-source architecture made it possible for the growing network of DAACS collaborators to enter data from their own excavation and collections-based research into the database and eventually share it on a new public-facing DAACS website, which was launched in 2013.
Responding to requests from DAACS Research Consortium members and scholars, Jillian organized the DAACS Summer Institute, the first of its kind program to train archaeologists in the material culture of the early modern Atlantic, DAACS classification and measurement protocols, and the fundamentals of database and data analysis.
During this period, Jillian also led important collaborative digitization projects, designed to generate and share on the web high-quality data from legacy collections from important archaeological sites, including the Hermitage, Monticello, and Flowerdew Hundred. She worked with Dr. Charles Cobb at the Florida Museum of Natural History to adapt DAACS protocols and software to digitize and deliver on the web data from legacy collections excavated on Spanish mission sites in Florida and on urban sites in St. Augustine.
Through her leadership of DAACS, Jillian and her colleagues in the Monticello Archaeology Department were awarded over $4 million in peer-reviewed grants. DAACS funders include not only the Mellon Foundation, but also the National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Park Service, the UK’s Joint Information System Committee, and, under the transformative leadership of Monticello’s late president Dr. Daniel P. Jordan, Monticello donors.
Jillian has held academic research fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the University of Virginia, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and Winterthur Museum and Library.
Read more about the development of DAACS here:
2019 Galle, Jillian, Fraser Neiman and Elizabeth Bollwerk. The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery: A Case Study in Open Data and Collaboration in the Field of Archaeology in New Life for Historical Archaeological Collections, edited by Ben Ford and Rebecca Allen. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.