Project

I am still in the process of narrowing down my topic, but my main interest are educational networks in the Ottoman Empire--especially as vectors of colonialism. I have previously studied the Alliance Israelite Universelle, and recently have started to examine the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
I have a background in history, thus as a starting point I am asking historical questions. But I am more interested in examining ways that historians conduct research in transnational settings, especially considering that these organizations (as above) were active in many countries over long stretches of time, and their archival records are dispersed. Essentially, I'm interested to see how do we make sense of dispersed material. One topic that particularly interests me is if new technologies offer us the possibility to go beyond traditional historical archival research and bring things differently together. Linked Open Data is one method, and I want to see where it can lead us. Another line of research that I think is relevant to my questions is work being done by computer scientists with machine reading technologies (entity extraction, automatic link creation). For such technologies to work we need e-text, and if we consider that the vast majority of archival records I'm looking into are manuscripts, we are faced of course with many obstacles. Mining finding aids is an obvious solution, but they in turn present other limitations.

Digital aspects/tools

I am heavily using Zotero.
I have used NodeXL and am interested in NodeXL.
I'm also exploring affordances of Linked Open Data.

Group membership(s)

• Roots and Routes 2014: Digital Scholarship and the Premodern Mediterranean