About

Course Description:

What did the Native American communities think, feel, and do in response to Euro-American settlement during and after the Revolutionary War? Who held power and of what kind in the late eighteenth century? How do we know? This course explores these questions and more using computational text analysis methods to understand the history and legacy of settler colonialism. In this course, you will learn how to structure data to prepare it for digital analysis using a variety of methods including word frequency, word distinctiveness, collocations, topic modeling, and comparative corpus linguistics. In addition, you will learn how to ask computationally tractable questions, detect bias, craft evidence-based arguments, and determine the limits of digital research methods. While this course applies these methods to historical research, the skills you will learn transfer to social media analysis, data journalism, marketing analysis, qualitative business analytics, and more. 

Animating Questions:

  1. Who was responsible for shaping events in the American territories?
  2. Who held power? What kind of power? How do we know?
  3. What did authority mean in the backcountry? What were the relationships between power, authority, position, and gender? 
  4. How did Native American leaders perceive the British, French, and Americans who came into their territories? 
  5. How did Native American communities relate to and communicate with one another?
  6. What are the possibilities and limits of computational text analysis, particularly when used to understand eighteenth-century Native people and communities? 

Researchers

Nadia Pandey

Nadia Pandey is an English major and a Digital Humanities minor at UCLA. She became interested in Digital Humanities due to its focus on the study of human behavior, experiences, expressions from the past and the present with computable methods and tools and hopes to use methods she has learned such as VoyantTools, Mallet etc in her career once she graduates in March of 2020. She previously interned at Target where she not only became familiar with the Human Resources department but became aware of the need to translate complicated data into everyday language. She hopes to keep learning to programs such as Python, UX design and other computer tools that Digital Humanities offers and use it to help make knowledge more accessible to everyday individuals.

Kai Colorado: Kai is a second-year at UCLA working towards a major in Sociology and minors in Digital Humanities and Cognitive Science. He is interested in the UX/UI techniques learned from Digital Humanities and hopes to pursue a career in graphic design.

Mary Cooper Wahlen is a second-generation L.A. native who grew up in Southern California. She is a non-traditional student who returned to college after thirty years to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and a minor in Digital Humanities at UCLA. Her return to college was motivated by her interest in studying why individuals do or do not prepare for natural disasters associated with their geographic regions. This interest stems from living near UCLA during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake and the destruction of her home in New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a proud member of Tau Sigma – a national honor society for university transfer students.

Estelle Jung: Estelle is a third-year Economics major and plans to minor in Digital Humanities at UCLA. With her work experience in luxury retail and entrepreneurial mindset, she hopes to create her own business one day. Her interest in Digital Humanities arose from her want to learn and use new methods of technology. She looks to apply the skills and knowledge gained from Digital Humanities to business analytics. She is currently a member of Alpha Delta Pi.

Nashra Mahmood: is a doctoral student at UCLA’s Gender Studies program, whose current research pursuits include circulation of fake news, online citizenry, SNS (social networking sites) user habits, and bridging the gap between qualitative and computational research methods. Their previous work has focused on connections between the informal economy and activist organizing in India, to illuminate the various survival strategies undertaken by street vendors and beedi rollers, to bypass state and non-state actors. Their ongoing research project is interested in the interplay of “Data”, “Facts”, and “Information” in the midst of information or data overload, on SNS. Specifically interested in the question of digital news-making in India, and the social construction of ‘data’, Mahmood plans to engage in 12 months of fieldwork at digital newsrooms in India, while collecting tweets and subtweets on Indian Twitter. When not consumed by their research project, Mahmood spends time cooking or painting.

Elizabeth Cruz-Nakamura: Hailing from San Gabriel Valley, Elizabeth Nakamura is senior majoring in Art History and minoring in Digital Humanities. She’s interested in contemporary art and technology. One of UCLA’s 2018 Internet Research Initiative prizewinners, Elizabeth has conducted research on AI ethics and Deepfakes.

Anthony Nesci: A 4th year Communication Studies major and Digital Humanities minor at UCLA, Anthony has previous background in Marketing, Sales, Business Development, and Recruiting. He saw Digital Humanities as a necessary addition to his professional foundation as his passion is technology, strategy, and networking. As a young professional, Anthony has worked in the Venture Capital and Tech Sales industries and was able to use his tech-based background to create and analyze visualizations for the American State Papers and other various sources for this project. His next step is to receive his degree and pursue an entry level role in either Sales or Recruiting.


Dr. Ashley Sanders Garcia: Vice Chair of the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA, she holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialization in Digital Humanities from Michigan State University and a B.S. in both History and Mathematics from Western Michigan University.  A comparative colonial historian, her research explores the development of settler colonies in the United States and French Algeria.  Her most recent publications include a chapter on building a DH program, which will appear in the latest book in the Debates in DH series, Institutions, Infrastructures at the Interstices (forthcoming), a maturity framework for DH centers (http://bit.ly/ECAR-DH), and the University of Nebraska Press is currently considering her historical manuscript, “Between Two Fires: The Origins of Settler Colonialism in the United States and French Algeria,” for publication. Her first Digital Humanities book project, entitled, “Visualizing History’s Fragments: A Computational Approach to Humanistic Research,” is under consideration with Emerald Press (London, UK).  In addition, she has begun work on her third book, entitled, “Imperial Margins: Ethnicity, Gender, and Identity in Ottoman-Algeria, 1518-1837.”

Dayoung Lee is a senior at UCLA and is majoring in Cognitive Science with a minor in Digital Humanities. She is interested in VR/AR/MR and UX/UI design and hopes to learn different aspects of these fields to keep up with the fast-growing technological advances.