I am an aspiring Digital Humanist. I am presently a History PhD at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln studying nineteenth-century politics, economics, and ideas.
My primary interest is in the economic, social, and political ideas of the Populists, a group of farmers and laborers that came together and fought Gilded Age capitalism in the late nineteenth century. They contested several presidential elections as The People’s Party and elected numerous Senators and Congressmen. The Populists were an interesting bunch. Like today’s populists, they made some important critiques of their contemporary world, but they also held some very upsetting nativist and, sometimes, racist ideas.
More than anything, I am preoccupied with understanding the economic reform ideas of the Populists and how they thought the capitalist system should work. Certainly, our own modern neo-liberal capitalist system was not the inevitable result of economic development. The Populists
January 2023
Recently, I presented the start of a digital project at the American Historical Association Digital History Lightning Round.
I presented a proof of concept project I’m working on that uses R and PowerBi to analyze keywords present in the Populists’ political platforms. Though counting words is undoubtedly insufficient to determine precisely what a political movement was concerned with, it can indicate areas of focus. It is a snapshot of what they thought their interests were at a given time.
I hope to leverage similar modeling in the future using a great deal more data from Populist newspapers to compare the economic ideas of the Northern (Plains and West) to the Southern movement. I am interested to try and discover the differences between how the two sections of the country thought of economic reform.
The results of the POC are below. Visuals were created in PowerBi Desktop, a free tool that I enjoy using to experiment with visualizations quickly and easily.
