Visualizing Emancipation and the Affordances of Digital Humanities

Abstract

Scott Nesbit is the associate director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond and a historian of the American Civil War era. “In this talk I will discuss the ways in which current humanistic questions can motivate new forms of visualizations, and how the capabilities—or, the affordances—of those visualizations then inform humanities scholarship. I’ll focus on how we conceive of and represent the end of slavery in the United States during the American Civil War, and how our historiographical and cartographic depictions of this process have changed over time. My reflections are largely based on my work on one such cartographic representation,Visualizing Emancipation, http://dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation.”