Digital History

Most of my research questions boil down to the same thing: how did information move through space, and what happened to it on the way?

That question is hard to answer one document at a time. So I’ve built datasets — of citations, advertisements, subscriptions, mottoes — and used topic modeling, text mining, mapping, and network analysis to see patterns no amount of close reading would surface.

Citationswho cited whom

Who cited whom tells you how information flowed through the revolutionary Atlantic. My book explains why.

Animated map alternating between two networks of newspaper citations radiating from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York: a sparse network for 1755 to 1779, then a far denser one for 1780 to 1804 — The two network diagrams above both show American newspapers’ foriegn citation patterns. The first covers 1755 to 1779. The second covers 1780 to 1804. Same three cities, same span of years, wildly different density.

Animated map showing North American newspapers' foreign citations by city advancing in five-year increments from 1755 to 1804, with node sizes growing as citation counts rise — The same data advancing in five-year increments, 1755–1804. Larger nodes carry more citations. Sizes are indicative rather than strictly proportional.

Animated detail map of European cities cited by North American newspapers between 1755 and 1804 — European detail.

Animated detail map of Caribbean cities cited by North American newspapers between 1755 and 1804 — Caribbean detail.

More at citation maps. This work was discussed in Sharon Block’s “#DigEarlyAm: Reflections on Digital Humanities and Early American Studies,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 2019).

Projects

Published

Dataset

Newspaper-Brokered Slave Trade Advertisements

The quantitative database behind “Enquire of the Printer,” published in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. A StoryMaps companion gives the same research a visual reading.

Ongoing

In progress

Recovering Haitian Revolutionary Print Culture

Using U.S. newspaper reprints to reconstruct an archive of papers published in St. Domingue during the Haitian Revolution &mdash. Assembling a lost print record from its copies. Still in progress, long stalled.

Dataset

Reference

Eighteenth-century newspaper mottoes

Collected by decade. Produced an essay on mastheads and the Revolution for the Journal of the American Revolution.

Tutorialsfree to assign

Step-by-step exercises written for undergraduates with no technical background. Both use openly available hitorical data, so students work with real material.

2020

Activity

Making simple network graphs with Palladio

Students build the citation network above from the underlying data.

2020

Activity

Topic modeling the State of the Union with MALLET

Adapted from The Programming Historian, with a prepared corpus.

Adapting any of this for your own students? Tell me how it goes.