In this course, students will analyze texts that Americans have treated as “scripture.” Students will read texts that present themselves as scripture, such as selections from the Book of Mormon and a Holy Sacred and Divine Roll and Book (a Shaker text). They will also read texts that have attained a sort of canonicity within American culture, such…[Read more]

This chapter describes the creation of “America’s Public Bible,” an interactive work of digital scholarship that identifies quotations of the Bible in U.S. newspapers. The chapter explains how the project works from a computational perspective and, more importantly, how those computational methods connect to research questions in American…[Read more]

This chapter describes the creation of “America’s Public Bible,” an interactive work of digital scholarship that identifies quotations of the Bible in U.S. newspapers. The chapter explains how the project works from a computational perspective and, more importantly, how those computational methods connect to research questions in American…[Read more]

Computational digital historians have tended to elucidate their methods rather than advance interpretative arguments. While this attention to method is salutary, given the absence of methodological discussion in history generally, it is not clear how computational historians can advance historical arguments while also explaining methods. Drawing…[Read more]

In this course you will learn to apply computational methods to create historical arguments. You will learn to work with historical data, including finding, gathering, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing, and arguing from data, with special attention to geospatial, textual, and network data. These methods will be taught primarily through…[Read more]

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across s…[Read more]