So what I'm presenting today is actually part of a larger project that involves applying
natural language processing techniques and topic modeling techniques to the complete
papers of Thomas Jefferson.
And I'm particularly interested in documents like this one, and this is an 1801 letter
from Thomas Jefferson to William Evans.
He ran an inn outside of Baltimore.
And I should say at the outset, this is a screen cap from the papers of Thomas Jefferson,
digital edition, and it's published and maintained by the Rotunda Press of the University of
Virginia.
They've been incredibly accommodating throughout this project.
So you can see in this letter that Jefferson makes reference to his quote, former servant
James, which is underlined in green.
And an editorial note at the bottom of the page, which I can't show you, informs us that
this former servant is none other than James Hemings, who is Sally Hemings' older brother.
And just a brief historical note for the non-Americans in the room, Sally Hemings was the enslaved
woman with whom Jefferson maintained a lifelong relationship and bore six of his children.
And when Jefferson traveled to Paris in 1785, he was then appointed minister to France,
sort of like a proto-ambassador.
He took both Sally and James Hemings with him.
People actually think that in Paris was where his relationship with Sally Hemings started
to begin, but it's all very unclear for reasons that you would expect.
What happened to James Hemings is actually a lot more clear.
Thomas Jefferson essentially sent him to culinary school.
He had him apprentice to the chef of a former prince, and James Hemings learned to cook
in the high French culinary style.
When his return to the United States, James Hemings decided to negotiate for his freedom,
which he obtained in 1796.
His story is fascinating.
I'll get back to it a little bit later.
Back to the letter.
On the screen, you can see that Jefferson is asking a friend to quote, send for him
and quote, tell him I shall be glad to receive him.
In fact, over the next few months, Jefferson would try to enlist James Hemings, who was
at that point a free man, to come with him to Washington, where Jefferson was about to
assume the presidency.
He hoped that James Hemings would become the head chef at the White House.
What actually happened is more complicated.
For now, I just want to call your attention to the fact that none of the information that
I've told you actually appears in this letter.
The only reason why this letter turns up in a search for James Hemings at all is because
an editor has noted the former servant James as referring to James Hemings, and that reference
has been added to the document as metadata.
My project actually concerns the other documents in the archive that make reference to Hemings,
both those that the editors missed, and there are a fair number, those that refer to Hemings
by one of his nicknames.
He was called Jimmy, Jimmy, so it's hard to do a keyword search to find all of the
entries.
I'm also interested in the other documents that refer to the men and women who Jefferson
enslaved who were less well known than James Hemings because of his relation to the Hemings
family, and so they're not rewarded by editorial attention at all.
Finally, I'm interested in areas in Jefferson papers where he alludes to members of the
plantation staff and the labor they perform, the services they provide, but not by name
at all.
There are certainly many instances of this, and there's something like 16 or 17,000 letters
that have been digitized so far.
To digital humanists, what I've described, it's a classic instance of, it's a prime
text mining opportunity.
Certain digital techniques can actually illuminate many of the issues that I've just described,
but what's interesting is that to scholars working in the archive of slavery, this also
appears as another classic example, but it's what's called archival silence.
The question of how one accounts for silences or gaps in the archival record, both those
that result from the authors of the documents themselves, those that result from the people
who decided which letters to keep and which ones not to.
How does one account for the power dynamics at work?
For instance, Thomas Jefferson who wrote the letters, and James Hemings who was described
in them, how does one make sense of sort of the strange set of inventories, record
books, travel narratives, receipts, things that we really need to struggle to find meaning
in.
Finally, this is sort of a more theoretical concern, but it's something that's really
important.
How does one do all of these things without sort of reinforcing this damaging notion that
African American voices before emancipation, not just in the archival record, but the voices
themselves are just, they're lost, they're sort of irretrievably silent.
In the humanities, this critical challenge has prompted a number of suggestions.
One of them is to focus not on what is contained in the archive but sort of animating the mysteries
of what it doesn't contain to sort of draw our attention to the gaps in the archive itself,
but in sort of conjuring a sense of these mysteries, most critics rely on traditional
techniques.
So I have decided instead to present a digital approach that complements these aims.
So using protoviz, which actually now has been replaced by D3, it's a JavaScript toolkit
out of Stanford, I was actually able to create a little art diagram about the people with
whom Jefferson corresponded about James Hemings.
I compiled this data, I'll show you something that's slightly different later, I compiled
this data just by searching the archives content and editorial notes for correspondence that
explicitly mentioned or that the editors indicated that mentioned members of the Hemings family.
And then I wrote a small Python script to sort of count the number of mentions and sort
of a very basic co-appearance analysis.
So you can see I've rearranged the correspondence into groups, those are what the colors indicate
from left to right.
Jefferson and his family, Jefferson's political correspondence, Jefferson's hometown friends,
Jefferson's correspondence in France and abroad, his enslaved plantation staff, his free plantation
staff, and then on the end the people about whom I could find very little or no information
about.
So an art connecting, two names indicated that they corresponded, and I haven't distinguished
between the author and the recipient of the letters, and this visualization, although
I'm working on more sophisticated visualizations that do that.
So because these are the Jefferson papers, all the arcs connect to him because he was
either the sender or recipient of each letter, and you'll notice the thicker, wider arcs
connect to Nicholas Lewis, who was Jefferson's neighbor in Virginia, George Jefferson, who
was Thomas Jefferson's Virginia agent, although not apparently a close family relation, Richard
Richardson who worked as a plantation overseer at Monticello, and presumably Jefferson corresponded
with these people about all of the services that the Hemings provided on the plantation
in the case of James Hemings, you know, all the materials and the needs that he required
in order to create these meals that he then served to everyone at the plantation.
The interesting thing, though, is that the fourth thicker arc, the one that connects
to William Evans, is sort of socially speaking an outlier, you know, it really doesn't make
sense why he is included in the correspondence in such a high ratio in relation to all these
other people, so I continued my research, and it turns out when you search for this
man William Evans in the Jefferson papers, you turn up this whole chain of correspondence
stemming from that first letter that I had up on the screen, you discover that Hemings
had actually already been involved in negotiations with Jefferson before Jefferson wrote to Evans
to enlist his help, and apparently Hemings took offense that Jefferson wouldn't contact
him directly, and he sent word back via Evans that he, quote, would not go to Washington
until Jefferson should write to Hemings himself, and so there's a really interesting indication
of sort of what was going on in the 18th century about who wrote to who and the reasons why
people took the time to put their words on paper.
In any case, whether or not Evans actually influenced the outcome of the situation, the
correspondence doesn't say.
There's an eight-month gap in the correspondence, and then there's one final exchange, and it's
from November 1801, and it confirms the, quote, melancholy circumstance of James Hemings'
suicide.
So there's really, there's no way to visualize the absence of, you know, human life such
as that, but what I was interested in is was there a way to visualize more profoundly Hemings'
absence from the archive, and so this was the next question I asked myself, and I realized
that it would require a more complex set of tools.
So I contacted at this point Rotunda Press, and they sent me the digitized versions of
the Jefferson papers in XML form, I extracted the content of the documents from the files
that they had sent me, and I ran everything through the Stanford natural language processing
named entity recognizer, which, I mean, this is part of a larger project, otherwise that
probably would have been overkill, but in any case, it was able to allow me to recognize
all of the proper names in all of the letters, and then I similarly sort of crunched the
names together, and I went through them by hand afterwards to figure out, you know, people
with similar names or people who were the same person who was referred to by two different
names, and then I visualized the data with protobis as before.
Okay, so, oh, sorry, so here you can see the four biggest correspondence that I was describing,
and so here's all of the mentions of the people in the letters, not the authors and
recipients of the letters, but just all of the people whose names show up in the same
dataset, the same letters, but all of the people involved.
So significantly, the arcs that link Jefferson to the men and women he enslaved in these
situations are, they're much more substantial than the ones that actually link to the authors
and recipients of the letters, and this, I think, suggests the degree to which Jefferson
relied on his staff to implement all of his various directives, so buying things, selling
things, even telling them things, and so this visualization really brings those actions
to the surface, even if it still can't tell us where they went or what they did or what
they said, and there actually, there are better techniques that I can apply in order to draw
out some of the answers to those questions, but what I like about this visualization is
that it does do something.
It really, it allows us to see this Jefferson archive, this sort of monolithic Jefferson
archive with new eyes.
It lets us see what it contains as well as what it omits, and it sort of reframes the
archive as the site of action and movement rather than the static archival presence from
the past, and at the same time, I think, it sort of reveals the limits of digital methods
and sort of the limits of the field of digital humanities, especially as it is applied to
literary text in the present moment.
We so often talk about the possibilities of digital humanities scholarship, what it opens
up, what it facilitates, the amazing things that it allows us to do, and those are all
incredibly valid points, but I also think we need to ask, and one of the things that
digital humanities can really do for us is to pose the question, sort of, what does it
really mean to know?
And when you deal with the archive of slavery, this archive that is fundamentally bound up
in these questions of impossible knowledge and questions that will remain unanswered,
this is sort of where I see digital humanities coming in and making not only technical but
theoretical interventions.
So I sort of want to end there, and I'll be interested to hear your questions and your
ideas.
Thank you.