Fall 2024: Digital History

      This week, I focused on two digital history projects and brought up the main question posed by the 2017 White Paper and by Stephen Roberson and Lincoln A. Mullen, what were these two projects trying to argue?     The first project that I analyzed was Scot A. French's Notes on the Future of Virginia: The Jefferson-Short Letters, 1787-1826 . I chose to reach this article and learn about this project because my current professor is Dr. French and I thought it would be interesting to learn about some of the previous work he has done. And interesting it was. Dr. French's project frames over 4 decades of letters between Thomas Jefferson and William Short by their ideological positions as well as key events going on while the letters were written to provide important context.       One of the projects interfaces works like a New York subway map. The user is able to select a key term and the interface will morph to show the letters that pertain to the key term selected. Some of t

    This week's material I have struggled to completely grasp, but I believe that that is more to the testament of how complex a question "who owns black data?" is than my own inability to understand (I hope). I think it is best to begin with the definition of what "black data" is. According to Jessica Johnson, data is "... an objective and independent unit of knowledge". I think it would then be safe to assume that "black data" is objective units of knowledge that pertain to Africana/African American/Black studies (from here on I will shorthand this to just Black studies, like Kim Gallon did in her chapter).      The question of ownership of black data is hard to answer because of a few reasons. Like many authors have pointed out, historical works, than being by print/digital projects as well as archives, are inherently racialized. Jessica Johnson mentions that "... blackness is most often constructed in proximity to bondage and the ris

        This week's readings expanded on the history of digital history. William Thomas does a great job outlining the adolescence of the field. His chapter, written in 2004, points the origin of digital history to the late 1960s and early 1970s when historians were on going through a "culture war". He explains that during these decades there was a rise in quantitative history that came about with early computers. The culture war was between the historians who believed that quantitative history was more in line with social sciences and deviated away for the "traditional" way history was done, which was narrative history. To note, Thomas does point out that quantitative history was done even in the 1940s, but he is rather emphasizing the use of technology in the 1960s and 1970s allowed for a vastly larger amount of data to be computed with more efficiency.      William Thomas emphasizes these debates between historians with the example of the 1974 publication of