Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

In A Report Has Come Here, the author of this piece demonstrates his/her findings when extracting data from historical documents surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s personal chef, James Hemings. This article made me think about how this data was collected and the difficulty that comes with combing through historical documents years before a digitized society. I can only wonder how researchers were able to digitize all of this information from written text considering the number of documents that probably exist. Another piece of information from the article that I found extremely interesting was the fact that researchers were able to discover nicknames that Hemings was called by during his time in France. While impressive, this piece also made me consider the process in which researchers went about going through this data. I found that BL’s comment about using the individuals’ biographical information to be insightful when thinking about this question, “Using biographical data would make sense under these circumstances, as there aren’t many clear indicators of social interactions in more historical time periods that would provide enough data points…” This information speaks to how valuable text analysis can be in terms of discovering data that is present in between the lines of these historical texts.