How I came to a World West of Worcester

This blog documents the grafting of a side project to the side of the research in my recently completed dissertation, "Thinking Like a Floodplain: Water, Work, and Time in the Connecticut River Valley, 1790-1870." This initial body of research studied responses to proposed and enacted changes in the flow of the Connecticut. It explored minute changes occurring across seasons, geological changes that had begun before European settlement, and would continue for as long as the valley existed. And it explored how residents of the valley remembered the historical flow of water and used this knowledge in articulating their opinions regarding proposals to re-engineer the river. Across six chapters it described communities actively engaged in water management practices even when they did not possess the technical skill, the political authority, or the capital to assert some semblance of control over the river.
Having defended my dissertation a little less than six weeks ago, I am currently taking a break from its further development and focusing my work time on learning a new set of skills in digital history that can eventually help to expand the vision and scope of this research as I try to transform it from a dissertation into a book. Even in the last three years of working on my dissertation, software such as QGIS, Paper Machines, Voyant Tools and the Edinburgh Geoparser have drastically simplified the process of working with text. Perhaps more importantly, improvements in OCR programs seem to have made many texts legible for processing in ways that they were not, or at least did not seem to be, when I was tending the growth of my dissertation.
These tools can potentially transform the scope of my research. I wrote my chapters as episodic accounts of how people responded to changing strategies for managing water. It took archival sources describing specific debates over water use and accounted for what exactly their proposers intended to do and how their opponents responded to those proposals. Mapping and machine reading tools seem to offer an opportunity to construct more broadly synoptic accounts of how people managed water. A vast corpus of geographical writing from the Early Republic provides minute descriptions of the state of industry, agriculture, and commerce in New England towns, and learning how to categorize the structure of these texts, mark up their standardized components, and represent this data spatially will provide an opportunity to understand new dimensions in landscape change across the nineteenth century.
But between my work typing today and the achievement of that goal lies a great deal of technical learning, training in digital history, and reflection on broader questions about history, temporalities, and landscape.