Infrastructure and Information Infrastructure
In her first book, Roads to Power (Harvard 2012) Professor Guldi departed from the thinking of such scholars as Michael Mann upon the infrastructure state, and infrastructure’s role in connecting markets. She argued in that work that, in the nineteenth century, Britain became one of the first modern nations through an extensive project of roads and highways—and that this connectivity between cities in the British Isles not only stimulated industry and trade, but also transformed the connective relationships among the populace, and became a powerful channel for trade unions, and for other radical and dissenting movements.
Since the publication of that work, Professor Guldi has been exploring and building novel forms of infrastructure to support new work in the digital humanities. These include software packages associated with Democracy Lab, where she directs projects with graduate students and undergrads in applied digital methods of studying Parliamentary history. In 2012, she introduced Paper Machines, an open source toolkit to help students explore distant reading technologies.
She has written extensively on how we might expand our conception of the history of infrastructure as it occurred in the nineteenth century. And in her recent monograph, The Long Land War, to be published Spring 2022 by Yale University Press, she discusses the vast global infrastructure project that unfolded from so many different directions in the twentieth century, including the vast cartographical projects undertaken to transform poverty worldwide, and the ambitious information systems projects that, while unfinished and ultimately abandoned, represented a bold direction for a new generation of transformative infrastructure projects dedicated to social justice, land reform, and remedying poverty. and climate change.
Much of her on-going work explores how infrastructure is changing how scholars work.
Relevant Articles and Talks
“Topic Modeling the History of Infrastructure in Nineteenth-century Great Britain,” Technology and Culture (forthcoming 2019)
“Topic Modeling Parliament’s Debates About Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University, May 14, 2021
“Digital Approaches to the Study of Infrastructure,” Conference on Early Modern Mobility, Stanford University, May 14, 2021
“Infrastructure, Society, Economics, and Culture: Lessons from the History of Large Technological Systems,” Universite de los Andes, Bogota, Columbia, December 5-6, 2017.
Keynote, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Infrastructure History, NYU Paris, May 30, 2017.
“Infrastructure in the Longue Duree,” Plenary Presentation, AAG Premeeting on Infrastructure, Boston, April 4, 2017.
“Property Rights, the Post Office, and the Making of the Infrastructure State,” A Symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads, University College Cork, Ireland, May 3, 2013.
“Human Infrastructure: Participatory Mapping in Chicago,” Conference on the Built Environment, University of Chicago, April 26, 2013. Video online at: http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/23839?size=custom&custom_width=1000
“Human Infrastructure,” Infrastructure Monument Conference, MIT, April 8, 2013.
“"Infrastructure for a revolution,” Media Places Conference, Umea University, Sweden, January 2013. http://mediaplaces2012.humlab.umu.se/program.html, http://storify.com/search?q=guldi+%40mediaplaces2012
"Britain Invents the Infrastructure State," Harvard STS Circle, February 2011.
“Infrastructure and Social Connection,” Social Computing Seminar, New York (January 2011).
"Keywords for the Infrastructure State," Early Modern Reading Group, November 2010
Podcast - June 2021 - Radicalxchange - Jo Guldi and Brent Hecht: Maps, Computers, and Other Abstractions - Information Infrastructure and Legitimacy
Podcast - 2017 - Making of a Historian Episode 41: The Infrastructure Revolution
Apr 2012 - Harvard - Conference: "Landscape Infrastructure" - Two day symposium exploring the future of infrastructure and urbanization.
Apr 2012 - Harvard - Conference: "Landscape Infrastructure" - Closing Roundtable
Data Science, Text Mining, and Natural Language Processing
Professor Guldi has been deeply involved in the digital humanities since 2008, when she began her post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, where she became the first person in the world to hold a position in Digital History.
History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press 2014), a book that she wrote in collaboration with historian David Armitage, was a sweeping reflection upon how the vast accumulation of digitized texts in the contemporary world requires new methods in the humanities. Her work with Armitage and in more recent years has explored how one can build a toolkit for mining digital texts that are specifically designed for examining nuanced and complex historical questions. Since 2014, Professor Guldi has been writing papers examining, theoretically and in pragmatic ways, how historians can use techniques from the computer sciences in general, and especially in the domain of natural language processing (NLP).
She is currently working on a book entitled, The Dangerous Art of Text Mining, which brings together many of the papers and talks she has given on the delicate reconciliation between the powerful modern technologies and the rigorous nuanced approach of traditional historians.
Among her many projects in this area, Professor Guldi founded and directed the digital humanities minor at SMU. As a member of the data science faculty, as well as the history faculty, she currently teaches courses in Python and R. Over the last several years, wishing to inspire and educate an up-coming generation in the digital fields, she has led an interdisciplinary hack-a-thon program called Think-Play-Hack: https://blog.smu.edu/think-play-hack/people/
Professor Guldi is the TI of a $100,000 NSF grant for applied text mining in the digital humanities. She is the director of Democracy Lab, a venue in which graduate students and undergrads explore applied digital methods of studying Parliamentary history.
Aside from these books and projects, she continues to write extensively a broad range of topics regarding the digital humanities.
Relevant Articles and Talks
“Topic Modeling the History of Infrastructure in Nineteenth-century Great Britain,” Technology and Culture (forthcoming 2019)
“Critical Search: A Procedure for guided reading in large-scale textual corpora,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (December 2018). Includes code and data.
“Topic Modeling the History of Technology,” University of Oklahoma, April 13, 2018.
“The Digital Humanities in 2025” and “An Introduction to Topic Modeling,” keynotes for the Digital Humanities Road Tour, various universities across Finland, January 27-February 3, 2018.
“Topic Modeling,” Talk at the Fondren Library Prism Panel, Southern Methodist University, October 23, 2017.
Topic Modeling Workshop, MITH, University of Maryland, College Park, November 3, 2012 http://vimeo.com/53078693
“Critical Search,” John Hopkins Workshop in Digital History, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, July 31, 2020.
"From Critical Thinking to Critical Search: Working between microhistory and macrohistory with big data," Conference on Humanities and the Arts in the Age of Big Data, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, Oct. 4-5, 2018.
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Conference, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, October 4, 2020.
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Keynote, Stanford Data Practices Conference, October 2, 2020.
“Frontiers of Text Mining,” Amazon Ideas Conference, Seattle, WA, Oct 16-18, 2018.
Nov 2012 - MITH - Topic Modeling Workshop: Guldi and Johnson-Roberson
Landscape and Land Use
In her first book, Roads to Power (Harvard 2012), Professor Guldi explored how, in the early nineteenth century, an ambitious national infrastructure project—culminating in an extensive highway system—transformed the British landscape not only in the physical and commercial spaces, but also in its social dimensions, and established a framework for understanding the common ownership of sidewalks, roads, parks, and other public spaces in modern cities.
Along with other works of hers, such as “The Spatial Turn”, this exploration of Britain’s transformation into an infrastructure state represents an early exercise in exploring spatial theories from a dozen different disciplines and their intersections.
Professor Guldi’s most recent monograph, Long Land War (set for publication at Yale University Press in 2022), was a study of the many international land reform projects that rose and fell over the course of the twentieth century, with a broad agenda of social justice and economic equity, culminating in a planet whose citizens would have a equitable relationship to food, water, shelter, and the ownership of farmland. This book is the apotheosis of a great deal of scholarly reflection upon how we might protect the basic rights to land and water—and especially, in the inescapable context of climate change, whose challenges both amplify and expand upon the historical dilemma of eviction, displacement, and the multiple dimensions of land struggles.
In her work at the history faculty of SMU, Professor Guldi has been teaching a major lecture course, spanning two semesters and thirty weeks, on Land Use and Capitalism. She has also published multiple articles on these themes—and especially, upon the application of new digital methods to studies of rent and eviction.
Relevant Articles and Talks
(with Ben Williams) “Synthesis and Large-scale Textual Corpora: A Nested topic model of Britain’s Debates overlanded Property in the Nineteenth Century,” in Current Research in Digital History 1:1 (2018): http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-01-synthesis-and-large-scale-textual-corpora/. Includes code, data, and tool.
“A History of the Participatory Map,” Public Culture 29:1 (January 1, 2017): 79–112. Link
“The Paper War of Land Reform,” Legal History Series, Boston University, March 2, 2017.
“The Longue Duree of Land, the Longue Duree of Land Reform: Towards a Utopian History,” talk at Uppsala University, November 21-22, 2016.
“The Long Land War,” presentation at the Hoover Institute, Stanford, June 24, 2015.
“Seminar on the Long Land War,” Mellon Seminar, The University of California, Davis, May 13, 2015.
“Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.
“The Long Land War,” presentation at the workshop on History, Culture, and Society, Harvard University, April 3, 2015.
“Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance? Food, Land, and Water,” talk at the Stanford Center for Liberation Technology, January 9, 2014. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9HHWEpAVFU
"Digital Methods and the Long Land War," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://digihist.se/2012/12/13/jo-guldi-om-digital-historia/
“"The Long Land War: A Global History of Land Reform, c. 1860-Present" Harvard International & Global History Seminar, Harvard University November 28, 2012
“International Finance and the Rise of Global Squatterdom,” Histories of Land, Economy, and Power Conference and Workshop, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/ehppf/land/program.html Harvard University, November 10, 2012
Dec 2020 - RadicalxChange - "Land Value: Past, Present, and Future" - Jo Guldi and Alisha C. Holland, moderated by Matt Prewitt
Apr 2016 -Harvard Law School - "Racial Legacies - Land of the Oppressed and Dispossesed" - Panel discussion on food justice.
Feb 2014 - Stanford - "Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance?" - Talk on Mapping Food, Land, and Water.
2010 - landsploitation - mini-documentary - River Trip
2008 - landsploitation - mini-documentary - Introduction to Landscape Studies
2009 - Landsploitation - mini-documentary - The Memory Machine: Thinking About History at the Abandoned Book Depository in Detroit
2008-2009 - Landsploitation on Apple podcasts - Misc audio and video
“Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.
Seminar, "Mapping Time, Mapping Space," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://storify.com/digihist/jo-guldi-in-gothenburg
"Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," DHCS Conference, Northwestern, November 2010
"The City Made of Words: Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," University of Virginia Library, September 2010
“Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," Society for Textual Scholarship, Penn State, March 2011.
“Citizenship and Connectivity: How Government Pioneered the Shape of Public Space in Modern Britain, 1803-1811” Panel on Landscape, North American Conference on British Studies, Cincinnati, Ohio (October 2008).
“Locating the Subject in Time and Space: Argumentation and the Longue Durée,” Keynote, International Network for the Theory of History (INTH), Stockholm, Sweden, August 20-22, 2018.
“A Distant Reading of Property,” Washington University, St. Louis, December 7, 2020.
"A Distant Reading of Property: Topic Models, Divergence, Collocation, and Other Text-Mining Strategies to Understand a Modern Intellectual Revolution in the Archives," Sawyer Seminar Series on Information Ecosystems, Pitt University, Pittsburgh, PA, January, 2020.
“Property Rights, the Post Office, and the Making of the Infrastructure State,” A Symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads, University College Cork, Ireland, May 3, 2013.
“Participatory Maps, a History,” Land Fictions Conference, Rutgers, NJ, May 1, 2015.
“The History of Participatory Mapping,” talk at Stanford History Department, October 24, 2013.
“Human Infrastructure: Participatory Mapping in Chicago,” Conference on the Built Environment, University of Chicago, April 26, 2013. Video online at: http://techtv.mit.edu/embeds/23839?size=custom&custom_width=1000
Seminar, "Mapping Time, Mapping Space," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://storify.com/digihist/jo-guldi-in-gothenburg
"Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," DHCS Conference, Northwestern, November 2010
"The City Made of Words: Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," University of Virginia Library, September 2010
“Mapping the Spaces of Subaltern History," Society for Textual Scholarship, Penn State, March 2011.
Feb 2014 - Stanford - "Are Crowdsourced Maps the Future of Community Self-Governance?" - Talk on Mapping Food, Land, and Water.
History and Historical Methods
Written in collaboration with historian David Armitage, History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014) challenged the paradigm of the short time scale, in which history has largely been written in recent decades. In this book, Guldi and Armitage argued an urgent need for the longue-durée study of history—and proposed that both historians and civilization itself must embrace a long term perspective to understand the multiple pasts that brought us to our current troubled global state—and that this temporal broadening of perspective will be required for survival on our troubled planet.
Along with a great deal of her more recent work, this collaboration with Professor Armitage represents a profound and on-going reflection upon the many methodological approaches to the long durée study of history. In her most recent monograph, Long Land War (to be published at Yale University Press in 2022), she has explored how this long term history can support the governance of climate change, and other crucial issues of our times.
Professor Guldi is currently working upon a new book, Dangerous Art of Text Mining, that explores in greater detail both the dangers and exciting potential of a hybrid methodology that reconciles the powerful approaches of digital technology with the sober and nuanced approaches of traditional historians. This book will examine a variety of modern and traditional theories of history, while showing how they can inspire new quantitative approaches of the data sciences, including a nuts and bolts approach to building algorithms nuanced enough to illuminate the complexities and ambiguities of human experience, and multiple temporal dimensions, and expand the practical applications of text mining and natural language processing (NLP).
This contemplative reflection on how one asks historical questions is a thread that runs throughout her work—and in many ways, Roads to Power (Harvard 2012) and “The Spatial Turn” represent early exercises in exploring spatial theories from a dozen different disciplines and their intersections. She has applied her on-going reflections upon historical methodology especially in the domain of British history, making probing investigations into state making, national formation, and spatial analytics.
Relevant Articles and Talks
The Measures of Modernity, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR HISTORY, CULTURE AND MODERNITY
(with Ben Williams) “Synthesis and Large-scale Textual Corpora: A Nested topic model of Britain’s Debates overlanded Property in the Nineteenth Century,” in Current Research in Digital History 1:1 (2018): http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-01-synthesis-and-large-scale-textual-corpora/. Includes code, data, and tool.
“The History of Walking and the Digital Turn: Stride and Lounge,” Journal of Modern History 84:1 (March 2012), 116-144. “The Other Side of the Panopticon: Technology, Archives, and the Difficulty of Seeing Victorian Heterotopias,” Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 1:3 (2011): 1-25. Link
(with David Armitage) ‘The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,’ American Historical Review, 120, 2 (April 2015): 543–54.
“The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities, May 13, 2021. Video here.
Keynote, Title TBD, Conference on Digital History, University of Umeå, December 2021.
“Critical Search,” John Hopkins Workshop in Digital History, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, July 31, 2020.
“The Missing Genres of Digital Argumentation in Historical Journals,” Panel on Argumentation in Digital History, American Historical Association, Washington, DC, January 6, 2018.
Talk, “Argumentation in Digital History,” George Mason University, September 15-6, 2017.
Plenary Talk, “Fastlanes and Potholes on the Road to the Future of Digital History,” Aalto University, Helsinki, June 2, 2017.
Presentation, “Introducing Paper Machines,” Princeton University workshop on Digital History, March 27, 2015.
Roundtable on digital history, Harvard History Department, March 2013.
“Front Lines: Early-Career Scholars Doing Digital History,” American Historical Association, January 4, 2013, http://aha.confex.com/aha/2013/webprogram/Session8898.html, http://storify.com/JohnOKDC/aha-2013-session-111-front-lines-early-career-scho
“The Dangerous Art of Text Mining,” Seminar on Digital Humanities, University of Indiana Urbana Champagne, May 21, 2021
“The History Manifesto, Revisited?” University of Manchester, Seminar on Digital Humanities, May 13, 2021. Video here: https://studio.youtube.com/video/cMiKw386_DU/edit
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.
“The Digital Humanities in 2025” and “An Introduction to Topic Modeling,” keynotes for the Digital Humanities Road Tour, various universities across Finland, January 27-February 3, 2018.
“Introducing Paper Machines,” talk at the Institute of Historical Research, Digital Humanities Seminar, October 7, 2014.
“Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7rumSNPw8
Oct 2014 - University of London - IHR Digital History Seminar - talk - Introducing Paper Machines
Oct 2014 - University of London - IHR Digital History Seminar - discussion - Introducing Paper Machines
May 2012 - Northwestern University - "Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students"
Oct 2020 - Stanford - CESTA conference - Digital Humanities
May 2012 - Northwestern University - "Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students"
May 2021 - talk - University of Manchester - "The History Manifesto, Revisited?"
Jan 2019 - Then & Now - Short-termism, Metanarratives and the History Manifesto
Nov 2014 - Columbia-SOFHeyman - A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age
Sept 2014 - Cambridge University Press - An Interview with David Armitage and Jo Guldi, authors of The History Manifesto
May 2012 - Northwestern University - "Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students"
“Discussion of the History Manifesto,” University of Swansea, Wales, February 8, 2018.
“The History Manifesto,” participation in dedicated roundtable hosted by the Washington History Seminar, Co-sponsored by the AHA, April 20, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” Annenberg Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, February 17, 2015.
“The History Manifesto,” presentation at the Kennedy School, comments by Sam Moyn, Harvard University, February 12, 2015.
“A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age,” presentation at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, November 17, 2014.
“The History Manifesto,” talk in the British Government series, London School of Economics, October 8, 2014.
“The History Manifesto,” talk at the History Department, University of California, Berkeley, September 29, 2014.
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Digital Humanities Workshop, University of Chicago, Oct. 4, 2019.
“Approaches to the Measurement of Time,” Keynote, Computational Text Analysis and Historical Change, Umeå, Sweden, Sep. 4, 2019.
“Measuring World View,” Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn, Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 27, 2019.
Roundtable, Digital Methods in Legal History, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt, March 1-5, 2021.
“Methods Intensive: Towards a Method of Textmining for Historical Analysis,” Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, November 17-8, 2016.
"Digital Methods and the Long Land War," University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 December 2012, http://digihist.se/2012/12/13/jo-guldi-om-digital-historia/
“Introducing the Digital Humanities: New Research Methods for Graduate Students,” Northwestern University, June 2012. Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl7rumSNPw8
Various talks to graduate students on digital methods, University of Chicago, 2008-11