I am a second-year PhD student in the Department of History, and my focus is on interactions between factions the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and French mediators in what is today Upstate New York. My thesis is particularly concerned with Fort Niagara, a French fortification built on the territory of the Seneca Nation in 1724, and the diplomatic interactions between the French, English, and Haudenosaunee that resulted from its construction. Currently, I am sorting through the documents that I compiled at the Archives Nationales in Paris and trying to situate them and my project as a whole within the body of scholarship concerning indigenous and French concepts of sovereignty and alliances, as well as limited control that both the French and Seneca had over the territory in question.
In this class, I would like to learn the ways in which I can employ digital methods to facilitate my understanding of the data that I have. This is not only regarding documents and correspondence, as I am very interested in including maps, and other possible forms of spatial data, into my project. As such, I am very interested in learning the ways in which such data can be used to benefit my comprehension of the subject, and to what degree it can be trusted at all.