Ph.D. Student Lucas Avelar to present at DH2024

April 22, 2024

Lucas Avelar, a second year Ph.D. student in Digital History, will present his digital history project entitled “An Imagined Geography of Empire: Mining cultural representations of the American colonial state during the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair” at the 2024 Digital Humanities Conference in Washington, DC. Avelar’s project uses named entity recognition and word vector analysis to assess how local newspapers produced their own discursive representations of the U.S. and the world in response to the ideologies of American colonialism and exceptionalism embedded on the grounds of the St Louis 1904 World’s Fair.

Avelar’s digital history project was first completed in the Ph.D. program’s Digital History Seminar – a research seminar that allows graduate students the opportunity to develop significant digital history projects based on primary source research.

The Digital Humanities conference, hosted by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, is one of the largest DH conferences in the field. Held once a year in the summer, this year’s host in George Mason University in Washington, D.C. It will be the the first time the conference has been held in the United States since 2013.