Presented at the Association for Computers and the Humanities Conference, 29 June – 1 July 2023, Online. Abstract: Over the past three years, the number of mental health, housing, food, and health-related challenges increased dramatically among students in response to overlapping and intersecting crises in the United States and abroad.…
Category: Percolating Ideas
Computational Methods for Restorative Data Justice: The Case of Early Modern Algeria (AHA 2023)
Posted in News and Notes, and Percolating Ideas
The case of Algeria, a palimpsest of overlapping Berber, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French legacies, highlights the problematic nature of colonized archives and the question of what decolonizing data means in such a context. In this talk, I extend arguments for archival decolonization to the age of big data by offering a definition of restorative data justice and presenting two methods by which we may begin this work.
Detecting Latent Textual Bias with Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis (DH 2022)
Posted in Digital Humanities, News and Notes, and Percolating Ideas
Presented at the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations annual conference, 2022, Online. Abstract Bias detection is an emerging area of research for digital humanists, computational linguists, and information studies scholars, alike, who point to biases inherent in our algorithms, software, tools, and platforms, but we are only just beginning to…
Can Data Silences Speak?
Posted in Digital Humanities, News and Notes, Percolating Ideas, and Research
Visualizing data absences prompts us to ask, Can the silences in the data speak? And if so, what do they say? How do silences in the data inform our understanding of the past and its representations? Can silences also inform the construction of an ontology?
Indigenous Persistence under American and French Settler Colonialism (AHA 2020)
Posted in Percolating Ideas, and Research
Presentation for the American Historical Association Conference (3-6 January 2020, Philadelphia, PA) Abstract: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American and French settler colonial metropoles installed new governments, laws, and people in the hereditary lands of Native Americans and autochthonous Algerians, but they never successfully replaced all Indigenous…
Dependent Power: Ottoman Governors and Algerian Elites in Constantine, 1567-1837 (MESA 2019)
Posted in Percolating Ideas, and Research
Presentation at the Middle East Studies Association Conference (15-17 November 2019, New Orleans, LA) Abstract In 1713 Ottoman General Kelian-Hussein found himself in Constantine, Algeria to reestablish peace and preserve Ottoman sovereignty in the defiant region, but military acumen alone was not enough. Multiple governors had come and gone so…
From the Margins to the Center: A Method to Mine and Model Complex Relational Data from French Language Historical Texts
Posted in Digital Humanities, News and Notes, Percolating Ideas, and Research
Presentation for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Annual Conference (9-12 July 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands) Long Abstract In humanistic research, Named Entity Recognition is highly useful, but it mines surface data, rather than revealing the complex nature of relationships between these entities. Named Entity Recognition (NER) extracts the names of…
Seeing in and through Silence
Posted in Percolating Ideas, and Research
“we ask to what extent the data have the capacity to characterize a person, an event, a period, or an experience. Where the data exhibit significant informational paucity, indeterminate values, inordinate biasing, or limited scope it is common to cast them aside in pursuit of something held to be more…
Topic Modeling 18th Century American Correspondence
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
This is a lightning talk of ongoing research, given at the 2018 American Historical Association meeting on January 4, 2018. I’ve revised the text of the talk to provide more details about this project below. Initially, this talk was entitled, “Text Mining 18th Century American Correspondence,” but I began my…
Visualizing the Birth of Settler Colonial Empires with Multimodal Digital Historical Research Methods
Posted in Digital Humanities, News and Notes, Percolating Ideas, and Research
Slides Long Abstract Digital historical research methods have transformed my understanding of primary source materials with which I am already deeply familiar. As the Director of the Digital Research Studio at the Claremont Colleges, I employ computational methods, such as text analysis and data visualization, to interrogate historical sources in…