This wiki also contains notes on other past projects, such as research I did on Refugeed Slaves, or the Texas Military Board, and the Texas Prison System,
He works with histories of oppressed or non-elite groups, revealing structures often overlooked in dominant archives.
notes for Sweet Taste of Liberty, there are several ways to navigate this site: Start on specific note pages like the ones for Henrietta Wood, Zebulon Ward
His research centers marginalized historical subjects, particularly enslaved people, bringing subaltern voices into visibility.
Absolutely! If anything you see here catches your eye and you’d like to collaborate on some or all of this project, please shoot me an email
He invites historians, students, and the public to interact, showing an inclusive audience target.
you can receive those updates if you subscribe by email here
He anticipates ongoing public engagement and addresses readers as participants in his research process.
This site is on the open web, meaning anyone can read any part of it
The notebook is intended for a broad public audience, not limited to specialists.
You can always see how recently a page has been updated by clicking on the “history” tab
His authority comes from transparent documentation of edits, allowing the public to verify his process.
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America (Oxford University Press, 2019), which mentions this wiki on the last page of the “Essay on Sources.” The book was supported by a 2016-2017 Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and it received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History
His authority is reinforced through major scholarly achievements, showing credibility in historical research.
I wanted to see what it might look like to conduct my research for scholarly works of history totally in the open.
He presents himself as a scholar who values openness rather than closed, private scholarship.
I created this website in 2012 as an experiment in open notebook history
He frames his identity as an open-scholarship researcher, showing his commitment to transparency in the research process.
My name is W. Caleb McDaniel, and I’m the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University
McDaniel positions himself as an academic historian and professor, establishing who he is and the perspective he brings.
The current digital ecosystem requires that people’s behaviour online (their clicks, their likes, their follows, their browsing) by monetized (and weaponized). Archaeology - and the popular conception of archaeology promulgated by so-called ‘alternative archaeologies’ - generates a lot of content, hence clicks, and thus money for Facebook, Amazon, Google.
This passage is an uneasy relationship between digital scholarship and capitalist infrastructures hosting it. My Silk Road GIS project participates in this ecosystem the instant that it goes online: each map view, zoom, and download turns into data that platforms can harvest for profit. In that sense, even well-intentioned digital research is complicit in the attention economy. Yet this awareness also opens a path to critical resistance. I redirect the engagements toward education rather than monetization by first prioritizing open-access hosting; second, sharing metadata through academic repositories rather than commercial clouds; and third, marking my visualizations for their interpretive and not entertainment value. The Silk Road GIS thus becomes both a case study and a critique of how digital archaeology operates within and can ethically challenge the systems which commodify knowledge.
Nowadays, visually appealling models can be generated by low-cost smart-phone apps and shared immediately with services such as Sketchfab (check out their Cultural Heritage & History category).
This democratization parallels the intent of publishing the Silk Road GIS map in an accessible, interactive format. This does both cases blur the line between professional and public digital archaeology supporting inclusive participation in spatial storytelling.
Photogrammetry, as the name implies, is the derivation of measurements from photographs. In our case, we are talking about triangulation.
This is reminiscent of how my GIS project took textual and archaeological descriptions and turned them into spatial coordinates; in both cases, qualitative evidence was rendered as quantitative geometry a digital act of translation that reframed historical data as measurable space.
It makes no practical difference, these days, to make a hard-and-vast distinction between the digital and the physical.
My maps of the Silk Road collapse that boundary as well. Physical features mountains, rivers are reduced to digital cost values, while the resulting maps guide historical hypotheses about the movement of trade, showing how computational representations can reshape our sense of physical geography.
As [Audrey Watters] (Watters (2012)) suggests, ‘parachute’ technologies i.e. devices that are dropped into school environments assume that children will ‘use [them], hack [them], and prosper’.
This critique runs parallel with 'parachute' uses of GIS: when the modern spatial models are imposed on medieval history without cultural calibration. My Silk Road model must avoid this by situating digital tools in historical and local contexts rather than assuming its universal applicability.
It is important at the outset to make the argument that digital archaeology is not about ‘mere’ tool use. Andrew Goldstone in Debates in the Digital Humanities discusses this tension (Goldstone 2018). He has found (and Lincoln Mullen concurs with regard to his own teaching, Mullen (2017)) that our current optimism about teaching technical facility is misplaced. Tools first, context second doesn’t work.
the Silk Road GIS, resonates with this caveat. GIS is not a neutered cartographic tool; it's one for framing. The interpretive logics in every parameter slope, trade hub density, terrain require the contexts to come prior to tool application. My workflow treats GIS as a reasoning medium, not software.
when designers seek to make devices more 'user-friendly' and in the process disguise their mode of operation, it becomes all the more important to investigate the role of cognitive artefacts within archaeology and the relationships and dependencies that exist within the digital ecosystem we are creating.
GIS interfaces are designed to simplify complex modeling decision behind neat buttons and sliders. My documentation resists that "user-friendly opacity" by explaining the slope factor, water barrier weight, and clusteering radius so that others could interpret or replicate the Silk Road model on their critical grounds.
As survey instrumentation becomes digital and increasingly automated, so the level of human engagement changes: the cognitive load is transferred to the digital device
In my Silk Road project, this interpretive workload is divided between terrain-cost and clustering algorithms. The model “thinks” through slope resistance and caravanserai density, freeing me to consider problems of historical interpretation rather than raw computation. The shift represents another key aspect of Huggett’s cognition migrating into the tool.
Individualisation considers the level of adjustment or customisation available to the agent. At one extreme, this may tailor the device to the individual agent such that it becomes difficult for another to use it, or to adapt it for another task. On the other hand, a device may be easy to pick up, use and understand with little scope or need for improved efficiency or effectiveness, and hence it is not especially individualised. Furthermore, agent and artefact may both be adapted together in what Heersmink calls entrenchment, where the cognitive artefact is individualised according to the user's needs, and in turn the user's behaviour and cognition are adapted by the device in a manner reminiscent of the McLuhanite 'We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us' (Culkin 1968, 60). (Heersmink 2012, 52-3; 2015, 590-1).
Cost-surface weights and clustering hyperparameters reflect my priors (slope, water gaps, caravanserai spacing). I’ll publish a config file and run ablations to avoid over-entrenching my personal settings.
for example, digital cameras, total stations, laser scanners, proton magnetometers, X-ray fluorescence machines, and their ilk – all encapsulate in various ways a mixture of techniques, calculations, and interventions that they employ on our behalf to explore, reveal, capture, and characterise archaeological objects.
The workflow records each tool's inbedded computation (e.g., DEM creation, geocoding, centrality). I’ll document versions, default settings, and procedural steps so readers may reconstruct how algorithms affected mapped "secondary" routes.
the tools we create, adopt, refine and employ have the effect of augmenting and scaffolding our thought and analysis,
This makes it approprite to treat GIS as theory-laden rather than "just a map." My route-finding and clustering decision (e.g., cost-distance versus DBSCAN) will determine which of the secondary Silk Road routes look significant, so method decision must be registered as interpretive rather than neutral.