Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) has received a $300,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The grant will fund a new initiative for researchers at Emory, across the U.S. and abroad to update and expand a prominent website run by Emory about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Emory announced in a press release.

Titled “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” (PAST), the project seeks to provide information on all historical figures linked to a slave voyage, including both the enslaved and enslavers.

“We are proud to house this project at Emory and grateful for support from the Mellon Foundation, which advances our efforts to make this extensive research publically available, broadening its reach and impact,” Dwight A. McBride, Emory provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said.

Launched in 2008, the website, called “Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” already has a vast amount of information, including the names of 30,000 slave ship captains and owners along with around 91,000 slaves, the release said.

“The Peoples of the Atlantic Slave Trade project builds on the scholarly resources of the Slave Voyages website and promises to offer new insights into the stories of thousands of individual people — both the enslaved and the enslavers — from this ignominious part of our history,” McBride said. “By adding searchable access to their names, the site will link these individuals to time and place, which in turn can help us better understand ourselves and our shared history.”