Humanistic Data—Classifying Individuals and Visualizing Silences

Although a common practice in the social and physical sciences, relatively few scholars in the humanities detail their data selection and organization methods, in part, because few humanists think of their sources as data. Whether a researcher compiles her own data set or uses preexisting data, she must understand the constructed nature of its categories, codes, and silences. This chapter, then, illustrates the process of selecting, mining, defining, and formatting information about the individuals selected for study, thereby modeling the subjective choices inherent in data set construction. Defining categories and a classification scheme is only the first step, but an essential one, to revealing the unfolding history of long-forgotten men and women, enslaved, and free who shaped the political world of Ottoman Algeria.