Visualizing History’s Fragments

"Visualizing History’s Fragments is ostensibly about Ottoman Algeria, but it teaches us so much more: about how to ethically account for silences in the archive, how to intentionally approach the production of history, and how to creatively imagine what the future of digital humanities research can be." — Lauren Klein, Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the Departments of Quantitative Theory and Methods and English at Emory University, USA "This was the textbook that I wish I had had, either as a graduate student or even as a new faculty member. This is not exaggeration: I can't think of a comparable work that weaves such an engaging historical case study together with such a breadth of methodological material, whether applied statistics, computational methods, source bias, or different levels of measurement. A must read." — Ian Milligan, Professor and Associate Vice-President, Research Oversight and Analysis in the University of Waterloo’s Office of Research, Canada This book combines a methodological guide with an extended case study to show how digital research methods can be used to explore how ethnicity, gender, and kinship shaped early modern Algerian society and politics. However, the approaches presented have applications far beyond this specific study. More broadly, these methods are relevant for those interested in identifying and studying relational data, demographics, politics, discourse, authorial bias, and social networks of both known and unnamed actors. Ashley R. Sanders explores how digital research methods can be used 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. Although digital tools cannot metaphorically resurrect the dead nor fill archival gaps, they can help us excavate the people-shaped outlines of those who might have filled these spaces. The six methodological chapters explain why and how each research method is used, present the visual and quantitative results, and analyze them within the context of the historical case study. In addition, every dataset is available on SpringerLink as Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM), and each chapter is accompanied by one or more video tutorials that demonstrate how to apply each of the techniques described (accessed via the SN More Media App). Ashley R. Sanders is Vice Chair of the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA, USA. Her teaching interests include applied statistics, computational text analysis, and social media data analytics. Sanders has taught both introductory and advanced Digital Humanities courses for both undergraduate and graduate students.