RESEARCH

Digital History + Spatial History + Data Visualization + Corpus Linguistics + History of Indigenous Americas

How does our view of distant, but enormously consequential events, like the Spanish invasion of Inka Peru, change with the application of new methods? My research integrates, digital and spatial history, data science and the digital humanities, distant and close readings, to explore the ways we can rethink history *from below*.

Recent publications include "Beyond Cajamarca: A Spatial Narrative Reimagining of the Encounter in Peru, 1532 - 1533," Hispanic American Historical Review (May 2020) and "Peering beyond the Imperial Gaze: Using Digital Tools to Construct a Spatial History of Conquest," International Journal for Arts and Humanities Computing (2017). Learn more

Teaching

Providing inclusive, experiential, project-oriented educational opportunities

    Courses taught or scheduled include:
  1. The Greatest Stories Ever (Mis)Told: Debunking Early American Myths from Columbus and Cortés to the Pilgrims (Dartmouth First Year Writing Seminar, Spring 2022)
  2. Placing History: Mapping and Visualizing Local History (Fall 2021, Dartmouth NAIS / HIST)
  3. A World Turned Upside Down: An Indigenous History of the Andes (Dartmouth NAS / LALACS, Spring and Fall 2020)
  4. Hacking History: Towards a Digital History of Latin America (USC HIST, Spring 2019)
  5. Invasions & Conquests: Myths, Propaganda, and 'Alternative Facts’ in European ‘Conquests’ of the Indigenous Americas (USC First Year Seminar, Spring 2018)
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About

From cheesehead to gringo chaski and digital historian

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Projects

Ongoing and past research projects

(For a gallery of ideas, projects, experiments, methods, and skills, click here)

Mapping Conquest

A Spatial History of the Spanish Invasion of Indigenous Peru (ca. 1528 - 1537)

A cartographic and visual re-imagining of one of the most dramatic and consequential events in world history. By re-visualizing and re-mapping the events of the Spanish conquest of Inka Peru, this book re-animates a dynamic, complex Indigenous world.

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Toponymia Americana

Extracting Indigenous Toponyms from a Dataset of 4 million place names

Mapping and Analyzing the resilience of Indigenous place names and - by extension - Indigenous history, as inscribed in the landscape.

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Texts as Databases

Early Colonial Andes Corpus

Uncovering hidden patterns long buried in early colonial texts using digital text analysis and text-mining methods. What new insights emerge by mining and mapping patterns within a digital text corpus of some 10 million words?

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Millions of Migrants

Analyzing and Tracing Migration Flows in the 1930s from Census and Other Data

Millions of Americans chose to move in the 1930s, a period of economic volatility and environmental crisis. Why did people move? And why did they move where they did? This project seeks to answer this question by integrating statistical and spatial analysis of the census records of 131 millions Americans with county-level agricultural, economic, and environmental data.

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125 Years of Historical Scholarship

Text-Mining and Analysis of 100,000 Historical Book Reviews, 1895-2020

How has historical scholarship changed in the last 125 years? What can we learn from a distant reading of 100,000 book reviews?

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