The Coded Language of Empire: Digital History, Archival Deep-Dives and US Imperialism in Cuba's Third War of Independence

Diaz, Arlene, Kalani Craig with David Kloster. "The Coded Language of Empire: Digital History, Archival Deep-Dives and US Imperialism in Cuba's Third War of Independence." American Historical Review (June 2024).

Kalani Craig, Arlene J. Díaz, and David Kloster (Univ. of Indiana Bloomington) develop and deploy what they term Mixed-Method Approaches to Collaborative History (MMATCH) that blends more traditional close readings with digital tools including computational text analysis to explore the language of empire and the struggles for Cuban independence from 1895 to 1898 from both American and Cuban perspectives. They also reflect on what it means to undertake a collaborative historical research project with nontraditional methods, foregrounding the importance of overlapping interpretative dialogue with each other around sources and methods for successfully realizing their project. Jo Guldi (Emory Univ.) in “Text Mining for Historical Analysis” examines the importance of several recent developments in computational analysis and the use of big data for historians: efforts to understand structural silences and biases in the archive around the histories of race, gender, and the postcolonial; explorations of causality in changing language usage over time; and emergent efforts to develop a theory of text mining for the discipline.

Jun 2024

Journal Article