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.