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Digital Scholarship Center

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Mapping the Global Renaissance

OVERVIEW

“Mapping a Global Renaissance with 53,829 Texts” redefines our understanding of a squarely humanistic problem: the history of race in Shakespeare’s era. By analyzing thousands of texts beyond the scope of a single famous author, such as Shakespeare or Milton, and even the capacity of the individual reader, I tell a very different story about the multiple discourses of race that helped motivate England’s earliest efforts to define its place in a global context in the era before colonialism.

My primary technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a topic modeling algorithm that identifies clusters of words exhibiting a disproportionately high probability of occurring together in all texts discussing place names in the 53,829 texts of the Early English Books Online corpus. My results affirm and complicate recent postcolonial accounts of Shakespeare’s world by redefining the ideology of race in a more nuanced way than along the faultlines of identity politics. Through this methodology, I articulate an unfamiliar Renaissance vision of race by challenging the basic assumption that ethnic otherness has always been built upon a bedrock of bodily difference.

The pre-modern idea of race was structured by a logic of place. Geography, and not skin color or anatomy, was the dominant factor in setting the terms of the debate. The primary question was how space, landscape, latitude, climate, and a location’s flora and fauna shaped a culture, its people, and their bodies. These results suggest the focus on the body as the measuring stick of racial ideologies should be understood as an invention of a colonialist worldview, and that historical alternatives to understand race in different terms exist. This study thus opens up a critical space to reanimate historically significant but unfamiliar models of race that we have lost in the postcolonial world.

Publications & Presentations

james-lee

James Lee

Associate Vice Provost for Digital Scholarship; Director, Digital Scholarship Center; Associate Professor of Digital Humanities; Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics

Professional Summary

James Lee is the Associate Vice Provost for Digital Scholarship and Associate Dean of Libraries at the University of Cincinnati. In his capacity as a researcher, he is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Center (http://dsc.uc.edu), and is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities.

His research and teaching focus on the areas of digital humanities, machine learning and text mining techniques on historical archives, social network analysis, and data visualization. Much of his work has used machine learning methods applied to large text corpora and other unstructured datasets to rethink what it means to perform historical analysis. His research also investigates ways to visualize the results of machine learning algorithms in a human-interpretable way that enables non-technical audiences to glean useful information from the data. More recently, his research has branched out into fascinating collaborations applying digital humanities methods with partners in biomedical informatics, law, design, and archeology. His work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

His current book project is a digital history of globalism and race entitled Anthropocene and Empire. It uses machine learning and data visualization techniques applied to 100,000+ texts from 1500-1800 to tell a new story of how England began to imagine animal and plant life on a global scale in order to redefine the idea of human race and the possibility of human empires. His first book, The Two-Soul’d Animal, studied the paradoxes and affordances of the classical and Christian souls in early modern culture in the wake of the Reformation.

Education

PhD, University of California, Berkeley

BA, Cornell University

Research Support

Investigators:Xuemao Wang and James Lee 01-01-2018 -06-30-2020 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation A Catalyst Model for Transdisciplinary Teams in Digital Scholarship: The University of Cincinnati’s Digital Scholarship Center Role:Co-PI $900,000.00 Active Type:Grant

Investigators:James Lee, et.al 2017 -2018 UC Provost Technology Innovation Award Role:Principal Investigator $199,125 Active Type:Grant

Investigators:Jeffrey Blevins and James Lee UC Provost “Toward an Open Monograph Environment” Grant Role:Co-PI $20,000 Active Type:Grant

Grant: #R40534 Investigators:Jackson, Sarah; Lee, James; Wang, Xuemao 10-01-2019 -03-31-2020 UC's Urban Futures Digital Futures Anchor Development Program Transdisciplinary AI: Applied Machine Learning for UC's Digital Future Role:PI $10,000.00 Active Level:Internal UC

Epic Social Networks and Eve’s Centrality in Milton’s Paradise Lost

By: Claire Ruegg and James Lee

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Literary and Linguistic Computing)

Digital Scholarship and Data Science

By: James Lee

Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science

Text Mining and Clinical Research

By: James Lee

Hospital Medicine Research Forum, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center

Text Mining across Disciplines

By: James Lee

The Collaboration Network, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine

Text Mining across Discipline (2018)

By: James Lee

Biomedical Informatics Research Colloquium, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center

Social Media, Social Justice and the Political Economy of Online Networks

By: James Lee

American Historical Association

Shakespeare’s Othelloand a New Model for the Digital Humanities

By: James Lee

UC Berkeley, Departments of English and Art History

Linked Reading: Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium

By: James Lee

University of Victoria

Leading and Enabling Enterprise Transdisciplinary Digital Scholarship and Digital Research Integration,

By: James Lee

Critical Roles for Research Libraries in Today’s Research Enterprise Colloquium

From Service to Partnership: the Role of Library Digital Scholarship Centers in Academic Research

By: James Lee

Shanghai International Library Forum

Digital Scholarship as a Catalyst: Translating the Humanities to STEM Fields

By: James Lee

University of Ottawa

Digital Scholarship and the Promise of Data across Disciplines

By: James Lee, Xuemao Wang

International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), Kuala Lumpur

Digital Scholarship and the Future of the Liberal Arts

By: James Lee

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Digital Bridges Symposium

Digital Humanities and Intellectual Moonshots

By: James Lee

Dean’s Advisory Council, University of Cincinnati

Data Visualization and Social Justice

By: James Lee

Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Cincinnati

Data Visualization across Disciplines (Spring 2017)

By: James Lee

Data Day Faculty Presentation, University of Cincinnati

Close Listening and Synesthetic Reading Across Multiple Poetry Archives: Tracking the Performative Afterlives of a Poem

By: James Lee, Arlene Johnson

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Conference, Montreal, CA

Data Visualization

By: James Lee

Division of Clinical Psychology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center

Building and Sustaining Transdisciplinary Teams

By: James Lee

Research and Innovation Week, University of Cincinnati

A Hybrid Model: Digital Humanities vs. Digital Scholarship

By: James Lee

University of Cincinnati Libraries

A Digital History of Race before Empire

By: James Lee

Digital Humanities Speaker Series, University of Cincinnati

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