collaboration – Cindy A. Nguyen

Last summer I started thinking about translating historical texts into ‘data’ and wrote a short blog post about it when I worked on the Cultural Heritage Informatics project. At that point, I pondered about the limitations of my recently minted Master’s thesis, where I analyzed tourism advertisements and travel stories to understand how individuals ‘mapped’ places with cultural, colonial, and personal significances.As a heavily theoretical cultural history project, I enjoyed the textual, literary, and tentativeness of such an endeavor. However, I could not answer many structural questions about the nature of Vietnamese tourism and genre of travel stories more broadly because of the qualitative nature of my project.

I wonder if others have had this experience in their own historical research? I myself am drawn to digital tools and more quantitative ways of thinking as a way of offering a broader perspective to my often very textual-based questions. With a deep yearning for more ‘concrete,’ quantitative data, I hope to create a digital history project within this line of thinking: translating historical text to data.

Continue reading “Digital Project Planning: Vietnamese Printing Houses”

Historian-Artist

Cindy Nguyen is a UC Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of History and Literature at University of California, San Diego. She previously worked at Brown University. She earned her Ph.D. in History at University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the history of Vietnam, Southeast Asia print culture, and digital humanities. Her book manuscript, "Bibliotactics: Social Life of Libraries and Colonial Control in Vietnam, 1865-1958" examines the cultural and political history of libraries and a state sponsored public in colonial to postcolonial Vietnam.

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