This project seeks to decolonize knowledge about Algeria, as well as the archive by repurposing digital tools to surface the most marginalized voices and experiences. In combination, text mining, close reading, and network analysis enable us to uncover the untold stories of both exceptional and ordinary women who lived between 1567 and 1837, the period in which this region was an Ottoman territory.
Colonialism Through the Veil Posts
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…
How did the Ottomans hold their empire together? 1800 miles separate Algiers and Istanbul (Constantinople on the map above). How did power flow from the center to the peripheries and back? Who exercised power and influence? How? The Ottoman Empire has long held a fascination for scholars, but only recently…
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 Using Multimodal Digital Historical Research Methods
Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas
Presentation Video: If the video in the embedded webpage does not open, click the link above to visit the page with the recorded presentation directly. Slides
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…