Author Archives: zheater

Zach Heater

10014710_757225257641509_6903422639484079189_nHometown: Indianola, IA
Class of 2017
Major: Classics, History

I have been working with the lab for this semester. I soon became interested in the early history of Newfoundland and the British charters surrounding its settlement and that has been my contribution to this project. My primary area of interest is classical history and languages, but the lab has greatly expanded my focus. This was my first experience working in the digital humanities, and it helped me better understand both the benefits and limitations of digital technology in our modern making of history.

Most college undergraduates do not have to opportunity to do real research. Often, if they do, it is only in assisting a professor or lab with set objectives and tasks for a research assistant to do. In the Mapping Sovereignty lab, this was not the case. It was made very clear throughout the semester that the intellectual goal, the final project, and the nature of the process were at the discretion of the group. Our advisers (Prof. Philip Stern and Andrew Ruoss) moderated group discussions but left most of the decision-making up to the students. In this way, we learned how complicated real research is and how much time it takes. It took us the majority of the semester to narrow in on how we wanted to treat this database of charters and what we wanted a final project to look like. We started with a database of 100+ charters, with a vague intention of mapping them using ArcGIS or Google Earth.

I don’t think any of us realized just how difficult and ambiguous our goal of “mapping” these charters was. Perhaps the greatest take-away from this semester in the lab is this: we learned first hand how complicated the process of mapping and interpreting historical geographical data is in a modern context. For instance, something that I spent plenty of time thinking through was whether it made sense to map the geographical data of a given charter on the modern map at all. Should we have been mapping these charters on period maps? Would that better enable us to see them mapped as the people writing and reading the charter might have done? Is it too much input on our part to try to put a historical vision of geographical realities on a modern map? In effect, our group opted to map the data from these charters on the modern map in order to show the impracticality of the charters’ demands. In more than a few cases, they show what amounts to — by our modern standards — varying degrees of misinformation.

On a more personal level, the type of thinking and question-asking I just mentioned caused me to step back and think more objectively about our acceptance of maps as factual documents. Even in this reflection, I have referred to the modern map as if it is more factual, more correct than the historical maps. It would be hard to deny this, given the dramatically improved technology with which we have been able to measure and see the world from all angles and distances. But more than anything, it is scary for us to think that we might be like these people of the past. We think our maps are factual, objectively true documents, but so did they. And look at what we say about them now! This has been for me the most enduring thought from my work in the lab, and I’m sure it will remain with me into the coming years.

Delaney King

kingHometown: Hillsborough, NC
Class of 2017
Major: History & Political Science

I joined the project out of a general interest for colonial history and was surprised to find how little I knew about the process of realizing colonial borders. I became highly interested in the means by which colonial settlers legislated and inhabited land with existing claims and existing populations. The European-influenced concept that land is not owned until it is improved was of particular interest, as Native American tribes had laid claim to the same land for generations prior to the arrival of the colonists. Through my involvement on the project, I also learned a great deal about the language of colonial legislating, the subjectivity of place names, and the mutable nature of borders themselves.

Reflection on Mapping Sovereignty

Mapping Sovereignty involved equal amounts of independent investigation and collaborative synthesis. Although I felt lost at the beginning of the project, having only a vague understanding of our project’s intended outcome, my own research contributed to and stemmed from the group’s collective research until we could confidently shape a final product. Understanding the realization of charters in colonial America simultaneously stimulated my personal interest in global jurisdictions, imperialism, and human populations.

I was repeatedly challenged, during our group meetings and my personal investigations, to reevaluate my assumptions about a specific person, place, or document in an effort to view the historical past as anything but fact. The work I did concerning the Georgia charter served as a perfect example; though seemingly straightforward at the outset, the boundaries for the new colony were repeatedly challenged, ignored, and manipulated by both European and extra-European interpreters.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project and having the chance to learn through both personal and collective exploration. I found it exciting to become involved in such a unique learning opportunity early in my college career, and I was grateful for the skills, both abstract and concrete, that I learned as a result.

Beth Blackwood

bethHometown: Conover, NC
Class of 2014
Major: History

I’ve been involved in the lab since 2011. During that time I led the curatorial teams that produced “Mapping the City: A Stranger’s Guide” and “Defining Lines: Cartography in the Age of Empire,” which displayed at Duke University’s Perkins Library and the Nasher Museum of Art, respectively. The lab has been an important part of my undergraduate career and I have appreciated the unique research opportunities.

Reflection on Mapping Sovereignty

Although I was not directly involved with Sovereignty Project until the fall of 2013, I have seen vast growth in the project in a short amount of time. The project took some time to focus and identify the question, but the results have been excellent learning experience.

My interests life in the digital humanities and technological aspects of the project and I signed on to work directly with GIS support; however, we were quick to discover that was not the ideal tool for a project with so little numerical data. I was able to find my place in the project through the web development and evaluative processes of situating the projects into the larger digital humanities literature.

Having come from a background in Google Earth from previous experience at the Library of Congress, I was greatly interested in the exposure to related projects. My largest influence came from the writings of Ruth Mostern and Doreen Massey, as they explored new definitions of space through historical analysis and focused on ways to evaluate those processes. Not all projects are great work just because they exist, something that I identified with in my past work with GIS. Mostern and Massey’s work contributed to my ability to put these thoughts to words, which resulted the in the Digital Mapping portion of the site.

Sam Kotz

kotzHometown: Wilmington, NC
Class of 2017
Major: History

I have been working with this lab for about a year. My focus has been on corporate sovereignty and The South Sea Company specifically. I am particularly interested in political and corporate history, especially in western civilization. This year in the lab taught me a lot about research techniques and mapping software. I also learned a lot about sovereignty as a concept and charters as a means of expressing it.

Jonathan Hill

hillHometown: Raleigh, NC
Class of 2017
Major: History and Public Policy

I have been involved in the lab for about a year now, but have become more engaged with the lab this past semester. I helped map and research the development and expansion of colonial Georgia, particularly its growth in 1763 and the inhibitors to such growth. My two particular interests are the history of Western Civilization in the 19th century and community history. However, there is always room to expand, and this lab has served as a wonderful place for doing just that.

Colin Scott

scottHometown: San Diego
Class of 2014
Major: History and Political Science

I’ve been involved with the Mapping Sovereignty Project since my junior year, when we were originally concerned with charting the course of a Mughal siege.  The project has been a fascinating journey and challenged my conceptions of what a research project could be. My involvement in the lab has fostered a greater sense of empathy for the people who came before us. The challenges of ordering such a chaotic world were immense and I believe the authors of the charters admirably grappled with these problems.

Lauren Jackson

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Hometown: Austin, TX
Class of 2014
Major: History, Political Science

I’ve been a part of the lab since Spring of 2013, first on the “Mapping the City: A Stranger’s Guide,” exhibit in Perkins Library at Duke University  then on the “Defining Lines: Cartography in the Age of Empire,” exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art, and now on the “Mapping Sovereignty” project. The BorderWork(s) Lab has been a wonderful forum for learning research, public history and digital humanities in an interdisciplinary and interactive environment, and I am indebted to it for exposure to an amazing group of researchers and unique research opportunities.

Audrey Keller

388437_10150423827613800_614391818_nHometown: Bedford, NY
Class of 2016
Major: History, with a concentration in Europe, Markets and Management Certificate, French minor.

I became involved in the Borderworks lab and the Mapping Sovereignty group in the spring of 2013, my freshman year, after hearing about it through Professor Stern’s Tudor/Stuart Britain class, which I had taken the previous semester. Since joining, I have been part of an attempt to map a battle in Bombay, a Philadelphia project, and the current charters project. This has taught me that research takes time and that the final product is not always going to be obvious from the start. This has been a continual process of trying to figure out where we were going, but in the end I think it finally came together. This semester I have been particularly interested in Connecticut and studying how the claims of the 1662 charter interacted with those of surrounding colonies, and how those claims acted in reality on the ground

Ted Leonhardt

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Hometown: Farmington, CT
Junior (Class of 2015)
Majors: History and Political Science

I began working in the lab last summer as a research assistant for Professor Stern examining documents from seventeenth century English Tangier. My continued interest in the history of the early-modern English empire led me to begin work on the Mapping Sovereignty project in the 2013 fall semester through an independent study. I have focused on the legal theories of colonial charters, the history of Connecticut’s border disputes, and using social network visualization software to map relationships between individuals involved in colonization. Studying these topics allows me to better grasp the origins of modern Anglo-American political and legal cultures and the development of different governmental and corporate forms.

Reflection on Mapping Sovereingty

At college, it is rare to delve deeply into a topic over the course of an entire year. Mapping Sovereignty offered me the opportunity to do just that. Finding small group learning opportunities at a research university like Duke can be challenging. Our group weekly participated in a largely self-directed seminar in which we could discuss core concepts, present findings, plan the expansion of the project, and generally have a fun time joking around as we got to know one another. Through the project, each of us developed a unique level of expertise, especially in research methodology. I hope that our project can serve as an example for future undergraduate humanities labs.

“Mapping Sovereignty” is an ambiguous concept, and one of the challenges of the project was defining our direction. At times, it could be frustrating to reach dead ends after several weeks of research. Our database of charters, which had been the focus of our work, seemed extraneous once we decided to conduct case studies on specific colonies. Yet the process of probing different angles of the sovereignty issue gave me a more holistic understanding of sovereignty and a greater grasp of the long process of research. Finally, I learned that what can seem like spent time often turns out to be valuable in producing greater understanding and tangible results. The database, once shelved, became the basis for social networking visualizations. Both the rigor and the reward of research lie in its meandering nature.

When I look over this website, I notice the potential for future projects in the vein of Mapping Sovereignty. Humanities labs are unique in that they lack a set syllabus for students to complete before the end of the term. This can allow for greater exploration while also leaving certain uncharted areas for future students. In particular, more case studies and the greater application of networking visualizations and timelines could augment this website. Were we to fully embrace the “digital” aspect of the digital humanities, we could partner with other schools to “crowd-source” this website.

At times during the semester, peers who did not partake in the lab would notice me working on the project and ask what I was studying. Repeatedly explaining the work of Mapping Sovereignty to “laymen” led me to reflect on why one might study sovereignty in the early-modern period. Sovereignty lies at the intersection of so many issues including legal, commercial, political, and social concerns. Factors from fishing rights (Newfoundland) to financial markets (the South Sea Company) affected the cases we studied.  In examining English notions of sovereignty in the early-modern period, we gain a glimpse of the foundations of the political-legal order that largely remains the basis of Anglo-American governance. If we wish to understand Britain, the United States, and many other parts of the world today, sovereignty is a place to start.