Using_Big_Data_to_Recover_Black_Women’s_Lost_History.pdf (4.19 MB)
Using Big Data to Recover Black Women’s Lost History
presentation
posted on 2019-05-15, 00:19 authored by Ruby MendenhallThroughout history, Black women’s lived experiences have often been invisible and erased.
Therefore, it is important to combat the erasure of Black women and move toward a correction and
claiming of their space within the digitized record. This presentation will discuss a study that
employs latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithms and comparative text mining to search 800,000
periodicals in JSTOR (Journal Storage) and HathiTrust from 1746 to 2014 to identify the types of
conversations that emerge about Black women’s shared experience over time and the resulting
knowledge that developed. This presentation will also discuss the potential for seamless creativity
and the need to de-mystify advance computing tools across the social sciences and humanities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruby Mendenhall is an Associate Professor in Sociology and African American Studies at the
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is also the Assistant Dean for Diversity and
Democratization of Health Innovation at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Mendenhall uses
mixed methods research to examine how living in racially segregated neighborhoods with high
levels of violence affects Black mothers’ mental and physical health. She also studies how racial
microaggressions affect students of color health and sense of belonging on predominantly white
campuses. She uses advanced computing to recover Black women’s lost history. Her research has
appeared in academic journals such as Public Health, Social Forces, Social Science Research,
Demography, Housing Policy Debate, The Review of Black Political Economy, The Black Scholar,
and Social Service Review.
