Invited talk for eLaboratories, University of Virginia.
The few extant fragments of knowledge from Algeria’s Regency period emerge from French and Algerian chronicles of the governors, travel narratives, diplomatic correspondence, a few surviving Ottoman registers, and commercial records from the French coral concessions. But through close reading, structured notes, and developing a custom, context-specific classification schema, Dr. Ashley Sanders has reconstructed data sets on the governors of Ottoman Algeria (1518-1837) for prosopographical study.
This reconstruction aims to avoid recreating imperial ontologies and instead aims to describe these men and women with categories that they themselves would have likely employed. Historical data set (re)construction is one way we can begin to address voids in the archive and use the tools of the colonizers to do reparative work.