I am pleased to announce that I have won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Digital History Seed Grant. This grant will allow me to further develop both the skills that I have learned this year through attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and working the Mathematical Humanists workshops with Drs. Jessica Otis and Ashley Sanders. This grant will pay for an Oxygen XML editor subscription and an ArcGIS Pro subscription for the next year.
Building off of a StoryMaps project I created earlier in my career, this project would expand past mapping two American women traveling through the U.S. and the Angloworld to further analyze the experience of cross-cultural religious experiences and its effect on both the role of female preachers/missionaries and American Protestantism. Encoding memoirs and other published sources will allow me to pull the geographic data of their travels in different countries, and create layered maps in ArcGIS that highlight the extent of women’s journeys abroad, and also account for the length of time they stay in other countries. I plan to embed the narrative of their travels into these maps. The maps funded by the IEHS will span the nineteenth century and cover countries in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Textually encoding these memoirs will let me expand the project after I finish the maps with the seed grant. Having the memoirs encoded will make it possible to conduct network and textual analysis to further explore the extent that American female preachers/missionaries (as well as British and Canadian women) left the domestic sphere and influenced the spread of American Protestantism. Encoding the memoirs to have both textual, geographical, and biographical data means that all the data to do different analysis will be located in one place and will propel later versions of this project forward to include more women and their stories.
In the future look for more posts about this project on my site and the IEHS blog. Stay tuned!
Caroline Greer 