Main article: “The Dissertation Can No Longer Be Defended”

Sarita Alami
Emory U., history
Dissertation: “Discipline and Publish: The Rise and Fall of Prison Newspapers”
http://www.saritaalami.com
Over the past three decades, the American prison population has grown significantly. Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have studied how and why the United States imprisons more people than any other country. Ms. Alami hopes to set her research apart from the work of other prison and civil-rights historians by using digital tools to give voices to incarcerated groups, particularly women and minorities, while tracing the history of prison culture from the inside out.
Prisoners once had more freedom to write and publish newspapers, Ms. Alami says, a freedom that has declined since the rise of mass incarceration, beginning in the early 1980s. Few inmate newspapers exist today, and those that do are controlled by prison administrators. Ms. Alami attributes the decline to a combination of overcrowding, budget cuts, an abandonment of rehabilitative activities, and an overall decline in newspapers themselves.
She is examining thousands of inmate-journalists’ reports and commentaries written between 1912 and 1980. Despite their heavy censorship, Ms. Alami says she is able to see how prisoners discussed national and international politics and how their writings reflect the changing conditions of American penal systems. She is processing her data with the help of an open-source-software tool kit called Mallet, which will allow her to not only classify prisoners’ writings by topic, but also to correlate their conversations with political events and uprisings. A big component of her dissertation will be a searchable online repository of prison periodicals, explanatory texts, and other exhibits and data for scholars and other visitors to use.
“I hope to show people how doing history can be very modern, interesting, and cutting-edge,” Ms. Alami says.

Sarita Alami’s dissertation displays newspapers produced at American prisons over six decades. The software highlights keywords.

Cameron Blevins
Stanford U., history
Dissertation: “The Geography of the Post”
http://historying.org
Mr. Blevins uses data visualization to map the historical geography of the postal system in the late-19th-century American West. He is building a mapping system to analyze where thousands of post offices were located, to pinpoint the routes connecting them, to see how railroad lines, mining booms, and Congressional districts influenced the opening and closing of post offices, and to study the people and organizations that kept the system running.
He plans to use that “geographic information system” to illuminate larger historical topics, like the changing influence and reach of the federal government, the tensions between the postal service’s headquarters, in Washington, and its offices in Western towns, thousands of miles away, and how the postal network changed in states as opposed to territories.
There are risks to a digital dissertation, Mr. Blevins notes: “What happens if you take months and months to learn a piece of software, digitize your data, analyze it, and don’t actually find anything?” But the benefits, he says, outweigh the downsides. “The ability to quickly overlay and combine different kinds of spatial and temporal data allows the historian to interrogate a system on a scale that would be impossible without this kind of technology.”

Cameron Blevins’s interactive map shows the number of post offices that were closed after the Civil War, as the postal system struggled to reintegrate the South into its network.

Edward Triplett
U. of Virginia, history of art and architecture
Dissertation: “Architectural Reconquest: The Fortified Presence of Christian Military Orders on the Iberian Border With Islam (1150-1400)”
http://www.edwardtriplett.com
Mr. Triplett says he’s been concerned that many scholarly books about religion and Islam published since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, tend to oversimplify historical relations between Christians and Muslims: “There’s either a focus on an historical golden era when Muslims and Christians got along, or scholars emphasize the hostile interactions between the groups.” He uses digital maps and three-dimensional animation to reconstruct architectural ruins from the medieval era to reveal a more-complex story about the exchanges between these cultures.
Mr. Triplett has been taking trips to Calatrava, a 13th-century fortress in the La Mancha region of Spain, and to the Castle of Montesa, a 14th-century structure near Valencia. He uses photogrammetry techniques, including attaching a camera to a kite to take aerial photos of the fortresses, to be able to recreate them in three dimensions.
When his digital renderings are complete, he says, “you will be able to walk around inside a medieval castle that was right on the frontline of two religious enemies.” Users will be able to assume the role of monks or knights, a choice that will give them access to different areas of the castles and create different experiences. “Having your body inside a space means you will have a much different experience than you do if you’re reading about it in a book or looking at a photo of it,” Mr. Triplett says. “More of your senses are being touched.”
He had to learn a lot of computer programming to be able to build the interactive maps. “For a lifelong humanist who had nothing but point-and-click computer experience,” he says, “this felt like adding a new major.”

Edward Triplett’s dissertation lets visitors enter historical ruins digitally reconstructed from 360 degrees of photographs.