Join us next week for the "Computing and Practice of History" event with Dr. Robert Nelson (Digital Scholarship Lab) as he presents his talk, "Topic Modeling and Textual Analysis of the Civil War."
When: February 27, 4pm - 6pm
Where: Maude Fife (315 Wheeler Hall), Reception to follow at D-Lab (356 Barrows Hall)
Robert Nelson will explore the instrumental functions of nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric during the Civil War. Using an innovative text-mining technique called topic modeling to analyze the entire runs of the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times during the war, it will suggest that the two newspaper used the same language of patriotism and nationalism but to different ends: the former to draw men into the army, the latter to draw voters to the polls to support the Republican Party. The talk will also more broadly reflect upon the methodological value of topic modeling, suggesting how cultural and intellectual historians can use the technique to interpret the concrete political, social, and emotional functions of elusive ideological discourses.
About the speaker:
Dr. Robert K. Nelson is the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab. His current research uses a text-mining technique called topic modeling to uncover themes and reveal historical patterns in massive amounts of text from the Civil War era. He is currently completing two projects from this research. One is a digital project that will publish and analyze multiple topic models of Civil War-era archives including the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times. The other is an essay that analyzes these models to produce a comparative analysis of Union and Confederate nationalism and patriotism.