Research

CURRENT RESEARCH

Putting Lesbian Community Building on the Map

I am collaborating with Dr. Annelise Heinz to study how lesbian feminists built community during the 1970s and 1980s. To do so, we map thousands of locations printed in Lesbian Connection, an influential bimonthly magazine with a national readership. Businesses ran advertisements in Lesbian Connection for commercial ventures such as Greasy Gorgon Garage, a lesbian-run mechanic’s shop in Hatfield, MA, or the women-owned record company Ariana Productions out of Cleveland, OH. Community groups posted notices about lesbian festivals, conferences, and resources, while individuals wrote letters to weigh in on issues or volunteered to act as local guides through a “Contact Dyke Directory.” Mapping these locations reveals a massive, geographically distributed network that challenges preconceptions of where lesbian feminists lived, worked, organized, and traveled.

Lesbian Connection’s Inaugural Issue (1974)

Data Advocacy for All

I am part of an interdisciplinary team from CU Denver and CU Boulder to win one of five CU Next Awards, which supports faculty pedagogical innovation across University of Colorado campuses. Our team is developing an open-access curriculum to teach students how to ethically and effectively inquire with data, communicate with data, and deploy data with a goal of creating more just futures. The project is building and then teaching an eight-module sequence at both CU Boulder and CU Denver beginning in Fall 2023.

Recovering Auraria’s Past

Along with my colleagues Rachel Gross (History) and Michelle Comstock (English), I am part of a public humanities project examining the historical legacy of displacement and removal that gave rise to the Auraria Campus (home to CU Denver, Community College of Denver, and Metro State Denver). Through a grant from the NEH Humanities Initiative, our team is embarking on a multi-year effort to create a curriculum website along with a series of multi-modal walking tours of Auraria’s history. Our goal is to preserve the memory of a displaced Chicano neighborhood, reckon with the campus’s complicated Indigenous past, and provide students with an opportunity to gain experience in applied public humanities.

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West

As millions of settlers moved to the western United States in the late 1800s, they relied on the US Post to stay connected to the wider world. Paper Trails maps the spread of more than 100,000 post offices to reveal how this unheralded institution wove together two of the era’s defining projects: western expansion and the growth of state power. The US Post rapidly spun out a vast and ephemeral web of postal infrastructure to thousands of distant places, operating what I’ve termed a “gossamer network.” The US Post’s sprawling geography and localized operations forces a reconsideration of the American state, its history, and the ways in which it exercised power.

Explore the companion website “Gossamer Network” to see the spread of thousands of post offices across the western United States.

US Post Offices in the contiguous United States, 1789-2000. Darker points represent exact locations and lighter points are randomly located within their surrounding county.

PAST RESEARCH

Algorithmic Gender Inference

In collaboration with Lincoln Mullen and Bridget Baird, I helped develop a computational method to infer the gender of names by using historical data. This approach offers a higher degree of nuance by incorporating the changing nature of naming practices over time – “Leslie,” for instance, went from being a predominantly male name in the early twentieth century to a predominantly female name by the end of the century. Gender package for R builds on an earlier prototype written in Python. I’ve applied this method to study the persistent gender gap in the American Historical Review.

The Production of Space in Historical Newspapers

Through a broader collaborative partnership with the University of North Texas, I’ve been examining a large corpus of digitized historical newspapers from Texas. My project uses text processing to recreate and analyze the imaginative geography of various times and locales in Texas history. The results of my research were published in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of American History, along with an accompanying online component at the Stanford Spatial History Project. The majority of the research took place through a research grant from the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities, as part of the Tooling Up for Digital Histories project at the Bill Lane Center and the Spatial History Lab.

The Geography of the Nineteenth-Century Novel

At Stanford’s Literary Lab we worked on a project to mine and map a corpus of several thousand nineteenth-century British and American novels in order to uncover macro patterns of how different places appeared over the course of the century. How did American space appear in British novels? What was the prominence of overseas colonies in literature and how did this change over the century? What were the different senses of place for the same location (ex. London)?

Mobility and Gender on the Overland Trail

My research examines Overland Trail diaries from 1851-1853 in order to evaluate issues of personal mobility and gender on the trail. Despite its conflation with the ideal of western mobility, I argue that personal movement along and off of the Overland Trail was instead marked by rigidity and restraint. These restrictions culminated in the trail experience of female emigrants, whose movements were restricted as a way of reifying traditional gender hierarchies.

Tooling Up for Digital Humanities

Tooling Up provides a gentle introduction to essential topics, skills, and issues related to digital humanities for scholars and researchers without a strong background in the digital world. In addition to producing online essays (co-authored with Andrew Robichaud), we held a series of workshops in the spring of 2011 aimed at introductory-level students and faculty. Our work is under the Tooling Up for Digital Histories project through the Bill Lane Center.

ImageGrid

ImageGrid is an open-source Processing program developed with Bridget Baird for visually analyzing images using a grid interface. An introduction to ImageGrid can be found here.

Text Mining the Diary of Martha Ballard

Since the spring of 2009 I have been working sporadically on text mining the diary of Martha Ballard, a midwife from Maine who kept a daily record of her life between 1785 and 1812. A series of blog posts outlines some of the process and findings.

Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith

As an undergraduate at Pomona College, I began researching Venture Smith in the summer of 2006. A resident of 18th-century Connecticut, Venture Smith dictated a famous narrative that detailed his life as a former slave in New England. My project focused on the role of land during his time as a free man by charting and mapping his real estate purchases over the final three decades of his life. My research can be found in an essay “‘Owned by Negro Venture’: Land and Liberty in the Life of Venture Smith” that appears in the edited volume Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom.