James Hemings was lost for the past 200 years. James represents the many who were easily left out of textbooks. As a slave and cook to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, James had been forgotten. Even in “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson” database which has over 25,000 entries, one could perform a search for James Heming and find no results. What allowed us to find James is advanced computational linguistics and data visualization. Through these techniques we can begin to peel back the mystery of James Heming and to discover him through the writings of Thomas Jefferson. These techniques allows historians to build profiles on indiviuals who left little to no evidence of their existence. Like dark matter we now know these individuals existed, but all we really have is a ghost of their existence.
What I find most interesting about these techniques is the fact that you can build a profile about an individual based on someone else’s paper trail. I find this intriguing because our profiles are created by our paper trails, but per say what if one never used the internet or left a paper trail. could we use say our parents, our siblings, our best bestfriends data and paper trails to create profiles about these modern day ghosts? Lauren Klein’s piece truly shows the power of data technology and how transparent our identities are in this modern world.
rystilson
I agree that it is very interesting that you can learn information about individuals through their interactions with others. In addition, I find this technology very insightful when looking at the daily life of people in the past. For example, when searching through the thousands of letters in the Jefferson database, it allows you to see that while he was often focused on political work, the majority of his time was spent dealing with his property. While the public sees all of the major accomplishments of Jefferson, they don’t see his day-to-day role as the owner of a large property. The way he treats the people that work for him can even serve to tell more about his personality than his famous works. It is very humanizing to be able to read a letter from Jefferson to a servant regarding food or daily tasks that you wouldn’t think Jefferson would have to deal with.
The data visualization also helps with this idea. Looking at the recipients of his letters you quickly realize that most of them were not to other founding fathers. They were to people like Fleming who handled Jefferson’s daily affairs. I wonder if Jefferson’s relationship with these people was similar to the way he addresses them in letters. It would be interesting to see if current presidents rely on people that will become lost in history. Surely with the amount of data that is collected now it would be hard for somebody to completely disappear, but it will be interesting to see if they are included in history textbooks or biographies.