Digital History

Emily Merchant, UC Davis - "U. S. Demography in Transition"
Abstract: At the end of the 1970s, American demographers faced a crisis: population control had lost its moral legitimacy, and private sources of research funding were drying up. This paper examines how demography as a field responded to the crisis, using structural topic modeling to analyze oral history interviews spanning nearly forty years. It finds that demographers tapped a new source of funding, the National Institutes of Health, shifting their research focus to health disparities in the United States, and converted the Population Association of America from an interest group for people concerned with population growth to a professional organization for demographers.
*Please do not share, cite, or quote from the attached manuscript, which is currently under review 

Stephen Weldon, University of Oklahoma, will describe his experiences working on the Isis CB (Current Bibliography) for the past sixteen years. He is kindly pre-circulating two papers in advance of his visit. The first paper details his work as a bibliographer and his innovations related to IsisCB Explore. The second paper details his experiences working on the IsisCB Pandemics Special Issue. 

• Stephen P. Weldon, “Building Infrastructure in the Digital Age: Case Study of the Isis Bibliography of History of Science, 2002-2018,” Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science 21 (2018): 21–40. https://doi.org/10.23925/1980-7651.2018v21;p21-40 
• Stephen P. Weldon, "On Open Peer Review in the IsisCB Pandemic Special Issue," History of Science Society Newsletter (July 2021): 29-30. https://cdn.ymaws.com/hssonline.org/resource/resmgr/newsletter_archive/hss-nl-2021-vol50-n3-july.pdf

E. Thomas Ewing (Virginia Tech), “The Frequency of This Occurrence was Greatly Exaggerated”: A Data in Social Context Study of the 1889-1890 Russian Influenza in New Haven
This paper examines the “Russian influenza” in New Haven, Connecticut, to explore computational humanities approaches to the history of medicine. Using newspapers and health reports, this case study applies methods such as text searching, close reading, data visualization, and statistical analysis to answer questions about the meaning of data in the context of a pandemic. The essay concludes with a reflection on the ways that studying historical pandemic during a pandemic has shaped the meaning and interpretation of epidemiological data.

Anna Guerrero, Marine Biological Laboratory and American Philosophical Society
Anna Guerrero is a PhD candidate in the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University. She’s usually studying history and philosophy of images in science, with a specific interest in fields that deal with entities invisible to the naked eye (like microbes). In this talk, she discusses how computational methods, particularly turning publication metadata and abstracts into networks (co-author, co-citation, keyword co-occurance) with VoS Viewer, can be used to investigate historical questions about the influence of scientists and their ideas. She will present these methods, the data they can produce, and the problems they can help solve through a case study investigating the influence of Günter Blobel and his idea of “protein topogenesis.”

Jaimie Murdock will discuss his paper, "The Origin of the Origin: Understanding Darwin’s Delay through his Reading Notebooks," which you'll find attached. The pre-print is also available at the following link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.09944 Background information on the project is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07175

Summary: There were 21 years between when Darwin first reported the Malthusian insight on natural selection and when The Origin of Species was published in 1859. In the intervening years, Darwin carefully recorded each book that he read in a set of reading notebooks. We reconstructed the contents of this library using digital collections and applied topic modeling to them to discern how Darwin selected the next book to read: was he motivated by deep dives or by massive breadth? We also compared the contents of these texts to the Origin and to several intermediate drafts. The computational models inform historical questions, providing novel evidence to support that Darwin's theory grew from the additional research time and was not held private out of fear of reprisal, but rather continuing to grow in response to newly published materials.

Ben Lee, "Compounded Mediation: A Data Archaeology of the Newspaper Navigator Dataset" 
 
In this paper, Ben Lee examines the strengths and weaknesses of the Newspaper Navigator dataset that he developed while recently serving as Innovator-in-Residence at the Library of Congress. The attached paper has been accepted by Digital Humanities Quarterly and is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue. You can also access a pre-print on the Humanities Commons. 

Abraham Gibson (UT San Antonio), "Digital Humanities in the Deepfake Era"
Author's note: "This chapter will appear in the forthcoming edited volume, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2022 (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). I am currently devleoping a larger DH project about deepfakes and the historical record, and I welcome suggestions and feedback." ~ AG