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Category: Percolating Ideas
History of the Old Northwest
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
A work-in-progress timeline by DGHM 150: Digital Humanities Studio students to make sense of the complicated history of what is now the American Midwest from 1754 to 1795:
Between 1776 and 1783, the newly formed United States was fighting for its life against Great Britain while at the same time settlers advanced into the frontier west and north, inciting Indian opposition and occasional reprisals as squatters encroached on Native lands. In 1777, George Rogers Clark, a surveyor and…
Introductory Text Analysis with Google’s ngram Viewer
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
Simple curiosity motivated the creation of these few graphs, but they will also be used in a graduate text analysis for humanists class as examples of the kinds of questions we can ask and answer with simple and accessible tools. Is there a correlation between uses of the words “frontier,”…
In the years prior to the American Revolution, the Ohio and Wabash Valleys, along with the Illinois Country, was a world of interconnected villages characterized by face-to-face interactions. In the eighteenth century, this territory was home to semi-nomadic and agricultural Native communities, including (from east to west) Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot,…
Visualizing Algerian history through time & space
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
The above timeline and map is my first experiment with MyHistro. While I love the way the map zooms and moves to different locations as the events of the timeline play through, I was disappointed that the photo embedding feature didn’t work. This would have made it an excellent tool…
Not everything came up roses in my dive into historical data visualization. For instance, some visualizations broke. The image on the left tells me nothing about the number of emigrants to Algeria from specific departments in France as expected. It was also very difficult to upload a custom map in…
This is my first foray into data visualization as a historian, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Of course, as a mathematician, I know that visualizing data can be a powerful way to explore it. However, as a historian, I have to admit, I was a little skeptical. I thought it…
Settler Colonialism in the US and French Algeria: A Comparative Overview
Posted in Percolating Ideas
I am not the first to make the remarkable comparison between the colonization of French Algeria and that of United States’ territories. Rather, mid-nineteenth century French statesmen conscientiously used the United States as a benchmark of progress in their Algerian endeavor. This may account for at least some of the…
Mathematics and the Humanities: Bridging the Divide
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
First of all, I love this image. Let me tell you why (and how it relates to this post)… It provides a wonderful pictorial representation of where we now stand – at the edge of a precipice with nothing but a flimsy rope bridge to reach the other side. On…