In her article “The Image of Absence,” Lauren F. Klein advocates for the use of data visualizations in recreating historical narratives. Specifically, much of her paper is spent analyzing Thomas Jefferson’s letter collection as catalogued in “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson” digital database. Her primary subject is a man named James Hemings, a slave of Jefferson’s who eventually became a chef at his French estate. Throughout her article, Klein notes that while Jefferson’s letter collection is extensive, researchers are rather limited in the potential claims they can make regarding the Antebellum period due to Jefferson’s narrow point of view. Furthermore, Klein suggests that data visualization methods and specific searches within the collection can elicit more telling information of the time period.
Klein notes that one of the main issues with any written work of this time revolves around the fact that they were published by white, landowning males. Therefore, even works written by slaves don’t yield an accurate portrayal of the networks and social structures that truly existed during Jefferson’s lifetime. Klein urges that in order to reconstruct these narratives, “We must look to the pathways of connection between persons and among groups, the networks of communication in which these men and women engaged, and the distributed impact of the labor they performed” (665). Here, Klein asserts, is where data visualizations can fill the gaps that individual letters and correspondences create. Perhaps the most interesting example of the role of data visualizations in her article, Figure 3 depicts the “networks of relations” embedded in a specific set of letters pertaining to James Hemings’ life. The figure, pictured below, was created by a computing process that identified groupings of words that resemble people’s names in 58 letters referencing Hemings. Klein concludes that figure exhibits the intricate relationships that existed between all members of Jefferson’s network, including his family, political correspondents, friends, plantation staff and his slaves. Examining Hemings’ node on the figure, it becomes clear that unlike the traditional narrative of the time, he was in correspondence with a variety of people, including Jefferson, Jefferson’s friends and even free plantation staff. Additionally, Klein notes that the significant amount of correspondence between Jefferson and the Hemings family suggests that he truly relied on his slaves and actively sought to communicate with them. The overall importance of the figure is to highlight the complex networks and interactions that are often difficult to see in such a one-sided historical narrative as the Antebellum period.
