Browse Exhibits
The Teutonic Order in Prussia and the Baltic
by Patrick Meehan
The Northern Crusades radically altered the spatial configuration of northeastern Europe during the later Middle Ages. This project will use digital tools to envision and analyze this complex historical process.
Digital Methods and North Korean History
by Hyung-joon Kim
Seventy years have passed since Kim Il Sung's triumphant return to North Korea, but the history of the country remains as elusive and contentious as ever. This project seeks to shed new light on the foundational period of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea using digital methods.The focus is on an archive of North Korean military newspapers from July 1948 to July 1950: what insights can this newspaper read through digital tools give us about the nature of the North Korean regime and its preparation for the Korean War?
Epistolary Networks in Song China (960-1279)
by Lik Hang Tsui
I am interested in the scholar-official communities that maintained their relationships by epistolary connections in middle period China. In this project I will focus on literati officials who exchanged letters with each other in Song China (960-1279). By examining the relationship of epistolary networks as manifested in digital analyses and the political allegiances of scholar-officials as historians have understood them, I hope to come up with some observations on patterns of elite networks and written communication. This builds on the understanding that I have of Chinese letters from my doctoral research on letter writing practices of the same historical period and geographical region, which is based mostly on non-digital analysis. Using digital methods will hopefully give us insights on the uses and limitations of computational analysis for studying Chinese epistolary sources.
Topic Modeling Equiano and the Slave Narrative Genre
by Matthew McClellan
Many historical accounts of the Anglo-American institution of slavery, the slave trade, and abolitionist movements have been written from the perspective of white Britons and Americans. In recent years, historians have begun to revise these accounts, bringing the accounts and voices of enslaved and formerly enslaved black men and women into the dominant discourse.
I hope to contribute to this revision by bringing more attention to the broad corpus of narratives written by and about these formerly enslaved people.My exploration of this corpus has focused on "distant reading" through topic modeling, a technique that uses probabilistic models to identify categories of words that frequently appear together.
Texts on Astral Sciences in Medieval Europe
by Allyssa Metzger
Begun in September 2015, this project aims to better understand the circulation of ideas about astral sciences in late medieval Europe, particularly after the introduction of Aristotelian rationalism from Arabic sources. It uses a two-pronged approach. First, it aims to give a better overview of key texts, so that the knowledge gained from exploring this project would be useful for even the most rigorous of scholars, but could equally provide an intuitive introduction to the material for a nonspecialist. Second, it analyzes the texts themselves in order to identify which types of texts should be accurately considered astrological, astronomical, cosmological, or belonging to other categories which are often (confusingly) conflated.
More accessible. More rigorously defined.