Digital humanities, data science, and early American literature
Last spring, I spent a month in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, conducting research for my food book. I recently wrote a blog post about that experience– and the experience, more generally, of conducing archival research. It’s now been posted on the NYPL blog, and you can read it here.
Image at left: Lydia Maria Child, Letter to Ellis Loring, March 9th, 1842. Source: NYPL MssCol 532.
In more good news, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been awarded three research fellowships for the 2013-14 academic year. I’ve received the “Drawn to Art” fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in order to conduct research for my second book, a cultural history of data visualization from the eighteenth century to the present. I’ve also received a one-month Mellon Foundation fellowship from the Library Company of Philadelphia for that project, which I’ll take up in May 2014.
In addition, I’ve received a Food Studies Fellowship from the New York Public Library in order to complete a chapter of my first monograph, Senses of Taste: Eating and Aesthetics in the Early Republic. My time at the NYPL will be spent exploring their historical cookbook collection, so as to determine how a shared cultural language of food emerged out of the transition from colonial rule to the early republic, and how that language transformed over the generations that followed into a national consensus about the interdependence of the cultivation of the American palate, and the cultivation of virtuous citizenship.
