In the third talk in the Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present: Methods & Challenges Webinar series, Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe will discuss their digital art history project on transoceanic circulation of South Asian textiles. The central component of their ongoing digital project, “Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602-1795,” is an online Visual Glossary of historic textiles. This resource unites three different data types (textual, visual, and material) and provides users with open access to data, images, and dynamic visualizations. In this presentation, Dr. Anderson and Dr. Kehoe will introduce their project's working proof-of-concept, which incorporates over 10,000 data points drawn from Dutch East and West India Company records between the years 1710 and 1715. They will discuss not only the challenges of building data sets from archival sources, but also the semantic implications of historic and cotemporary data structures. They will also talk about the process of building interactive web applications, which were made by Middlebury College undergraduate students using the programming language R over the course of a 4-week pilot course called “Data Science Across Disciplines.”
For more information and link to register, please visit our website. Please contact Deepthi Murali at dmurali2@gmu.edu if you have any questions.
Deepthi Murali, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, RRCHNM, George Mason University