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Visualizing History’s Fragments with the Ottoman Algerian Registers
December 10, 2024 11:00 am – 12:00 pm Eastern Standard Time
The few extant fragments of knowledge from Algeria’s Regency period emerge from French and Algerian chronicles of the governors, travel narratives, diplomatic correspondence, a few surviving Ottoman registers, and commercial records from the French coral concessions. But 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.
Watch this webinar, originally presented on Dec. 10, 2024, to learn more about Dr. Sanders’ strategies for recovering details about the lives of the countless men and women mentioned in these documentary fragments. In this presentation, Dr. Sanders shows how historical data set (re)construction is one way we can begin to address voids in the archive and use the records of the colonizers to do reparative work. Slides from the presentation are also available here.
About the Presenter
As a multidisciplinary data scientist and historian with over nine years of experience in academia and consultancy, Dr. Ashley Sanders specializes in leveraging advanced statistics, machine learning, data visualization, and dashboarding to transform data into compelling stories and actionable insights. For more than six years, she served as the Vice Chair of Digital Humanities at UCLA and, prior to that, as the Director of the Digital Research Studio at Claremont Colleges. Her latest publication, Visualizing History’s Fragments: A Computational Approach to Humanistic Research (Palgrave, 2024) 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. 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. She holds a Doctorate in History with a specialization in Digital Humanities from Michigan State University, along with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and History from Western Michigan University.
