L. DENNIS SHAPIRO AND SUSAN R. SHAPIRO DIGITAL HISTORY SEMINAR

The Shapiro Digital History Seminar at the MHS will introduce audiences to the inner workings of in-progress projects that depend on digital methods, such as the translation of analog primary sources to a digital format, the use of computational tools for research and analysis of historical data, and the creation of “publications” in any form of digital media to communicate with audiences. The series will emphasize engagement with archival source materials, and presentations will include works intended for academic scholarship and/or for public history. Attendees are encouraged to provide feedback, and presenters may occasionally recommend review of circulated materials before the session meeting.

These sessions bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. After brief remarks from the author and an assigned commentator, the discussion is opened to the floor. All are encouraged to ask questions, provide feedback on the circulated essay, and discuss the topic at hand. Our sessions are free and open to everyone.

How to Attend: Register through our Calendar of Events and you will receive the session's discussion paper the day before the seminar by email.

Subscribe: Purchasing a $25 seminar subscription gives you special advanced access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe here.

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Questions? Email seminars@masshist.org.

Call for Proposals!

Deadline: May 1, 2025

We are currently accepting proposals for the 2025-2026 seminar season. For more information, see the Call for Proposals.

Upcoming Events

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Past Events

Digital Histories of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Radical Accounting in Dance’s Archives

Digital Histories of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Radical Accounting in Dance’s Archives

Online / NOTE: times are shown in EST

Wednesday, October 30, 2024 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST

A dance company comes into being piece by piece and person by person. What might a history look like that traced the full trajectory of each? With the case study of celebrated African American modern dance choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-89) and the company he founded, Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit lay out their methodology of radical accounting, through which they unpack the complexity and historical contingency of the arts ecosystem of which Ailey was a part.

Digital History Seminar on Projects Related to Public History and Documentary Editing

Digital History Seminar on Projects Related to Public History and Documentary Editing

Online / NOTE: times are shown in EST

Thursday, May 16, 2024 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST

Based at the University of North Florida (UNF) in Jacksonville, Editing the Eartha MM White Collection (unfdhi.org/earthawhite) engages communities both on and off campus in publishing digital versions of the papers of White (1876-1974), an African American businesswoman, philanthropist, and civil rights leader whose vision and work continue to shape the region today. Since its founding in 2016, nearly sixty participants have worked with more than 217 documents, which include personal letters, professional correspondence, speech notes, event programs, newspaper clippings, and other items. The project operates as a partnership between the UNF Digital Humanities Institute, the UNF Africana Studies Program, and UNF’s Thomas G. Carpenter Library, where the collection is housed.In this presentation, we consider Editing the Eartha MM White Collection from the perspective of two complementary approaches to working with archival material. We first locate the project within current documentary editing practice, describing our use of TEI-XML and Omeka to publish online, interactive full-text versions of materials that previously were available only as document images or through in-person consultation. We also analyze the project’s collaborative workflow as a type of digital public history praxis, looking in particular at how our on-campus and community workshops engage diverse constituencies in the recovery of local African American history. In conclusion, we reflect on the value of these processes for promoting awareness and appreciation of Jacksonville’s African American communities in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, a past that has been largely forgotten or erased.

Fitting Form to Argument: Developing a Digital Publication for the Complexity of Harlem in Disorder

Fitting Form to Argument: Developing a Digital Publication for the Complexity of Harlem in Disorder

Online / NOTE: times are shown in EST

Thursday, March 21, 2024 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST

Stephen Robertson’s granular data-driven analysis of events produced an interpretation of the racial disorder in Harlem in 1935 as a complex mix of attacks on white individuals and property and police violence. The print monograph was not a tenable form for such an interpretation as it requires arguments that are selective rather than inclusive in both their evidence and argument. Instead, building on digital historians’ experiments in the 1990s, Robertson used the digital publishing platform Scalar to create a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. Enacting a humanities approach to data, each event has a page that describes the interpretive choices made in determining its features and names and identifies the individuals involved. Events are aggregated and incorporated into the narrative using Scalar’s tags, which link to pages that offer a site for analysis and interpretation not just connection and collection. Clicking on tags moves a reader across the dense web of connections that they create, drawing out threads of argument and intertwining them reveal the complex character of the racial violence in 1935.

Linked Data Models for Digital Scholarly Editions of Historical Accounting Records

Linked Data Models for Digital Scholarly Editions of Historical Accounting Records

Thursday, November 9, 2023 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST

This paper focuses on creating taxonomies for goods and services grounded in Historical Statistics of the United States (HSUS), a bicentennial edition published by the Census Bureau in 1975 and a millennial edition published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Taxonomies of goods and services with origins in HSUS will enable creation of metadata based on decades of historical scholarship either as an alternative to or in addition to such contemporary non-scholarly examples as Wikidata.

The Capacious Sacrament of Necessity: Community Formation in Early American Godparentage Networks

The Capacious Sacrament of Necessity: Community Formation in Early American Godparentage Networks

Thursday, March 16, 2023 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST

New York and Pennsylvania before the American Revolution were some of the most ethnically and religiously diverse colonies in North America, and baptismal witnessing tied together these diverse groups. Baptismal ties both created and reflected long lasting social ties: parents selected neighbors, business partners, and extended family as godparents, who were then expected to socially and financially support the baptized child up to adulthood. Digital social network analysis of these connections shows that in the decades surrounding the American Revolution, women grew in prominence as essential connectors within otherwise ethnically fractured congregations, suggesting the increasing social role of women in the creation of American national identity.

Digital Methods for Understanding Historical Travel Guides: A Case Study of the Digital Methodologies behind Mapping the Gay Guides

Digital Methods for Understanding Historical Travel Guides: A Case Study of the Digital Methodologies behind Mapping the Gay Guides

Thursday, February 23, 2023 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM EST

Thanks to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MGG team is in the process of digitizing another 150,000 entries from the guides between 1981 and 2005. Doing so involves taking these digitized primary sources and transcribing them before geocoding each location using either an automated script or finding the coordinates for each location by hand. Our process for turning each of these historical documents into data that can be used for mapping is a process fraught with methodological decisions at every turn. These decisions shape the resulting dataset. This paper discusses the ways in which this methodology impacts what kinds of questions are able to be asked of the data and focuses on the use of such tools for doing historical research.