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from the issue of May 1, 2008
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Digital Research in the Humanities | Third in a four part series
Seefeldt maps Jefferson's vision of the west
BY SARA GILLIAM, UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS
When Thomas Jefferson daydreamed about the American West, what did he imagine?
He might have read travelogues about violent winds that churned the Missouri River, creating perilous travel conditions for Canadian traders. He may have seen paintings of Choctaw Indians living in what would become the state of Mississippi.
With the information that was available to him at the time, how could Jefferson - who never traveled farther west than Virginia - conceive of this vast region?
Doug Seefeldt, assistant professor of history, has an answer. By collecting and cataloging maps, correspondence, treaties, journal entries, books and statutes, he has created "Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark," jeffersonswest.unl.edu an interactive, thematic digital history project that explores the third U.S. president's relationship with the expanding borders of his country.
Although perhaps his most famous collaboration was with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Jefferson looked west throughout his life, Seefeldt said. He read frequently and widely, and was conversant in geology, geography, philosophy and anthropology. He was a cartographer and the first director of the census. The Lewis and Clark expedition was, for Jefferson, the culmination of a lifetime of ideas.
Jefferson was a prolific chronicler of his thoughts. He penned massive amounts of correspondence and kept copies not only of letters he received, but those he sent. He recorded what he read and what maps he owned, and kept detailed logs of his travels. His fastidiousness resulted in a treasure trove for future scholars.
To create "Envisaging the West," Seefeldt spent several years gathering and digitizing letters, maps, books, laws, reports, treaties, and journals that Jefferson wrote or contributed to. He then marked the texts with digital tags, such as the names of plants, animals, individuals, and Indian tribes. Once these tags were in place, users of the Web site could search texts for specific references, (such as John Adams or chiefs of the Cherokee.) Alternatively, they could search maps for specific locations or individuals and, in turn, see where they turned up in Jefferson's writings.
Visitors to the Web site can browse Jefferson's bookshelf - an annotated list of books on geography that Jefferson was known to have read or owned - and review the chronology of his life. They can also tour one of nine interactive maps, which use GIS software to integrate cartographic information with documentary records, notions of landscape, land use, and geopolitics in Jefferson's era. These maps, Seefeldt said, demonstrate "how these constructs changed over time as westward movement and exploration gradually revealed Western geography, pushing back the boundaries of the unknown from the edge of Virginia to the Pacific Coast."
Seefeldt was first exposed to digital humanities technologies as a graduate student at Arizona State University. After earning his doctorate, he received a Woodrow Wilson postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Virginia, which was, at the time, the country's leader in digital history scholarship. It was at UVA that he began mapping Jefferson's West, while serving as director of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Project.
For Seefeldt, the process of conducting research for digital history projects is similar to any large-scale academic undertaking. He utilized information from a number of archives, historical societies, and map collections, including those at the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, and the David Rumsey Map Collection.
"Even if I was writing a book, I would still have collected as much information as I could, but you - the Web site visitor - wouldn't have immediate access to it," Seefeldt said. "If you're reading a book, you can look at footnotes but that's about it. This access component (of digital humanities research) is absolutely valuable. But I still have to be a historian. I have to contextualize and interpret material and present my analysis of it in a way that is scholarly. It's not just replicating a book online; this form of historical discourse is fluid and dynamic."
The ongoing nature of digital humanities publishing could result in unending projects, always available for tweaking by their authors. But that, Seefeldt believes, would be a mistake. At some point, we have to allow ourselves to move on to new projects, he said.
The notion of completion is complicated, because once a digital project is launched online, traditional mechanisms for review and publication don't exist.
"There are no venues for publishing digital scholarship of this scope and scale," Seefeldt said. "The Journal of American History reviews Web sites, and that's one way to show you're finished - have it reviewed by your professional association. In terms of peer review, we're still trying to figure out who the peers are in the field. They have to be historical content experts who also understand the possibilities and best practices of the digital component."
These early complications for the field will no doubt fade over time, in part due to new generations of students who expect to incorporate digital components into their research and coursework. For example, students in Seefeldt's Intro to Digital History class conduct research on University of Nebraska history, learn text encoding, and then digitize their findings for publication on the Nebraska U Web site (unlhistory.unl.edu).
"They're totally excited, because at the end of the term they're going to have something that will live on, and not just collect dust on a shelf," Seefeldt said. "And the Archives are very excited to have these 12 new Nebraska U projects."
Seefeldt's graduate students are also exploring new media tools for use in their own teaching and research. They are building online bibliographies using Zotero and bookmarks using del.icio.us, marking up text in XML and using the textual analysis tool TokenX developed at UNL, and creating Google Earth historical overlays. Seefeldt believes that such projects help students discuss what these tools mean to historians, and how emerging historians can integrate these tools into our work.
See a video of Doug Seefeldt speaking about "Envisaging the West."
GO TO: ISSUE OF MAY 1
NEWS HEADLINES FOR MAY 1
Griffin to retire after 22 years
Management study attracts top NU award
Seefeldt maps Jefferson's vision of the west
The Scarlet in PDF Format
A 'mudhole with potential'
Astronomy Day event is May 10
Favorable trend increases term life coverage
Fell donates cartoons to Archives
Researchers test technique to remove contamination
SPRING AFFAIR
University releases new penstemon called 'Sweet Joanne'
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