PhD Student in U.S. History, University of Southern Mississippi
When people think about the American Civil War, the picture that often comes to mind is that of a divisive sectional conflict. The north rallied around the causes of preserving the republic of the Union and (eventually) liberating enslaved people. On the other side was the south who rallied for the creation of an independent […]
If part of the objective of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on January 1st, 1863) was to disrupt the southern military and economy by displacing slaves from their plantations, is there historical evidence that it worked? Letters to the Governor of Mississippi indicate that the effect was nearly immediate. In a letter to […]
I can see a high degree of articulation between what happens in public history and what is being done in Digital Humanities. If anything has shifted for me these past two weeks, it is that the connection between the two has solidified. Digital formats like podcasts have become excellent sources of Digital Humanities scholarship. Podcasts […]
Freedom On the Move (FOTM) is a Digital Humanities project that focuses on fugitive slave advertisements that were published in historic American colonial newspapers. It currently numbers nearly 30,500 fugitive slave advertisements in its database. These advertisements constitute a source of information about fugitive slaves that otherwise people today might not otherwise know anything about. […]
Learning about and trying my hand at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was not too strange or overwhelming for me. Our Humanities 502 class last semester did some work on html, and the TEI system (or really the XML system that structures it) did not seem appreciably different. It can be really frustrating when you […]
I like the main point that Ted Underwood made about the separation between digital techniques and the long history of distance reading in his article, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading.”[1] Underwood recognizes that scholars have been doing distant reading of texts long before digital techniques came about and were applied to it. Digital tools and […]
This digital humanities project, The People’s Contest, A Civil War Era Digital Archiving Project , is a digital archive of Civil War Era resources. It specifically brings together resources in the state of Pennsylvania between 1851 (when the Christiana Riot occurred, an event triggered by the Fugitive Slave Act) and 1874 (the end of Reconstruction). […]
Our small (but highly capable) HUM 501 class worked collectively to draft a set of community guidelines for collaborative work in our small (but growing) Digital Humanities (DH) network here at the University of Southern Mississippi. Establishing guidelines is essential, because by its very nature DH projects often require that teams of diverse people come […]
In Alana Lentin’s chapter, the basic argument is that racism is inherently built into algorithms. Users don’t see it obviously and are not necessarily aware of it, because information is imputed then results are outputted, but the algorithm functions as a “black box” that masks the racism built between the input and output.[1] Similarly, authors […]
It has been both interesting and challenging to re-conceptualize Digital Humanities (DH) in light of some of the theoretical issues being raised by its practitioners. For example, I hadn’t made a natural connection between the practice of DH and its environmental global impact. I had considered that archives were culturally biased in how they amassed information. Yet, […]
