Visualizing the Past: Tools and Techniques for Understanding Historical Processes

The University of Richmond requests a Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up grant to bring together experts for investigations about how to overcome limitations that prevent most humanities scholars from taking advantage of visualization techniques in their research. The grant will fund a two-day workshop where invited scholars will discuss current work on visualizing historical processes, and together consider: (1) How can we harness emerging cyber-infrastructure tools and interoperability standards to explore, visualize, and analyze spatial and temporal components of distributed digital archives to better understand historical events and processes? (2) How can user-friendly tools or web sites be created to allow scholars and researchers to animate spatial and temporal data housed on different systems across the Internet? The grant will also fund initial experiments toward creating new tools for overcoming obstacles to data visualization work. Results will be presented as a white paper

Unions of Slavery: Slavery, Politics, and Secession in the Valley of Virginia

Book chapter discussing research on the issues involved in the secession of Virginia around the Civil War, including slavery and politics

Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration

Crucible of the Civil War offers an illuminating portrait of the state’s wartime economic, political, and social institutions. Weighing in on contentious issues within established scholarship while also breaking ground in areas long neglected by scholars, the contributors examine such concerns as the war’s effect on slavery in the state, the wartime intersection of race and religion, and the development of Confederate social networks. They also shed light on topics long disputed by historians, such as Virginia’s decision to secede from the Union, the development of Confederate nationalism, and how Virginians chose to remember the war after its close.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1258/thumbnail.jp

The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools

Article on the History Engine Project, an online archive consisting of thousands of narratives written and contributed by undergraduates

Mapping Historical Texts: Combining Text-mining & Geo-visualization to Unlock the Research Potential of Historical Newspapers

The digital age is overwhelming most scholars with far more information than they can process through traditional means. If scholars are going to make sense of millions of digitized historical newspapers they need more effective tools for uncovering meaningful patterns than a basic word search can provide. What scholars need are more sophisticated methods for (1) identifying meaningful patterns embedded in large-scale digital datasets and (2) tools for visualizing those patterns so they can be understood. This project will combine the two best methods for such work: text-mining and geo-visualization. We will mine digitized historical newspapers for language patterns scattered across millions of words, and then map that information as it moved across time and space. The result will be a series of working models demonstrating how humanities scholars can both extract meaningful patterns from otherwise overwhelming datasets and then make sense of those patterns by visualizing them

Texas Newspapers Natural Language Processing

This dataset includes data on natural language processing from the Texas Newspapers Project. The dataset includes word counts, name entity recognition results, and topic models

[Review] Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands

This article reviews the book "Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands," edited by Gene Allen Smith and Sylvia L. Hilton

OLLI at UNT Podcast

Interview with Dr. Andrew Torget for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) podcast. In this episode, Susan has a wide-ranging discussion with Andrew Torget, Associate Professor in UNT's History Department. She and Dr. Torget discuss why it's important for us to learn about history, how he recently made history by teaching the world's longest history lesson, and his connection to the recent discovery of a safe full of documents that reveal the presumed-lost history of the Galveston City Company

This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell

Randolph B. “Mike” Campbell has spent the better part of the last five decades helping Texans rediscover their history, producing a stream of definitive works on the social, political, and economic structures of the Texas past. Through meticulous research and terrific prose, Campbell’s collective work has fundamentally remade how historians understand Texan identity and the state’s southern heritage, as well as our understanding of such contentious issues as slavery, westward expansion, and Reconstruction. Campbell’s pioneering work in local and county records has defined the model for grassroots research and community studies in the field. More than any other scholar, Campbell has shaped our modern understanding of Texas. In this collection of seventeen original essays, Campbell’s colleagues, friends, and students offer a capacious examination of Texas’s history—ranging from the Spanish era through the 1960s War on Poverty—to honor Campbell’s deep influence on the field. Focusing on themes and methods that Campbell pioneered, the essays debate Texas identity, the creation of nineteenth-century Texas, the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the remaking of the Lone Star State during the twentieth century. Featuring some of the most well-known names in the field—as well as rising stars—the volume offers the latest scholarship on major issues in Texas history, and the enduring influence of the most eminent Texas historian of the last half century

Topic Modeling on Historical Newspapers

Paper for the 2011 ACL Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities. This paper discusses topic modeling on historical newspaper