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Colonialism Through the Veil Posts

By the Numbers: Constantine Governors in Ottoman Algeria, 1567-1837

Posted in Research

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 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…

The American Revolution in the Wabash Valley

Posted in Percolating Ideas

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,”…

The Heterogeneous World of the Wabash and Ohio Valleys, 1760-1778

Posted in Percolating Ideas

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…