Digital Humanities Techniques for Asylum Studies in the Archive

This project explores the utilization of digital humanities techniques and tools for the purposes of transcription, data analysis, visualization and presentation of archival data pertaining to asylums in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 2017, the Community Histories Workshop’s Asylum in the Archive initiative has been digitizing and transcribing records relating to the admission and the assessment of people in the Dorothea Dix asylum from 1856 through 1922. My project builds off this work by developing machine learning models to increase transcription efficiency for future records as they become available, and working with the dataset to analyze, visualize and present the data to tell the history of the asylum and psychiatry. The result demonstrates the value of the work already done, leaves examples and models for future scholarship utilizing this dataset and contributes to broader understanding of the emergence of psychiatry and the asylum in the South.Master of Science in Information Scienc