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…
Tag: Digital Humanities
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…
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…
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…
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…
Settling into my new home(s)
Posted in Digital Humanities, and News and Notes
Nearly a year later, I am finally setting up my new Omeka site. It’s been an eventful year! In December 2014, I interviewed for and accepted a position as a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Claremont Colleges Library. You can see slides from my interview presentation on trends in digital…
AHA Roundtable Presentation Ashley Sanders, Ph.D. Digital Scholarship Librarian, Claremont Colleges New York City, January 2, 2015 In an animated discussion with other graduate students gathered around a homemade dinner in Aix-en-Provence, I discovered that I was not wandering alone in the darkness as I sought out methods to search the archives…
A home of my own
Posted in Digital Humanities, and News and Notes
I just wanted to provide a brief update and announcement: The first stage of my project, Settler Colonialism Uncovered, will be moving from the server at Michigan State University. I will forever be grateful to MATRIX and the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative for the training and first digital home they…
What would a map of French colonial Algeria or the American Midwest look like if we took a humanistic epistemological approach? How would such a map change if it took into consideration the humanistic notion that space is a construct influenced by perception (of travel times, of fear, of violence,…