Recovering archival specters with digital historical methods How might historians use digital research methods to study archival specters – people who lived, breathed, and made their mark on history, but whose presence in the archives and extant documents remains limited, at best, if not altogether lost? A number of scholars have written cogently and movingly […]
Computational Methods for Restorative Data Justice Introduction While “data” is often understood today in computational terms, as information coded and organized for interpretation with digital tools and algorithms, the term has a long history dating back to at least the seventeenth century. In its earliest uses, data is defined as a “given” and a basis […]
This talk explores how descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing open new windows into Ottoman governors' experiences in early modern Algeria.
Invited talk at the UK Institute of Historical Research - Digital History Seminar. Bias detection remains an area of interest for digital humanists, computational linguists, and information studies scholars, who point to biases inherent in our algorithms, software, tools, and platforms, but we are only just beginning to examine how computational methods could be used […]
Sanders will show how this concept of restorative data justice may serve as a bridge between academic studies and work in current data cultures.
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.