ABSTRACT
Many people in the past left only the faintest traces in the archive. This chapter proposes a set of Digital Humanities practices that explicitly work against the structures that kept those voices silent in the first place. It uses Digital Almshouse Project, a dataset of Irish people who entered the Bellevue Establishment in New York City in the 1840s. This chapter illustrates the ways in which scholars can bring “big data” analyses to bear on silenced voices and can deploy quantitative analysis to reveal opportunities open to historical actors written out of history. It argues that we must bring together new archival methods and the old cliometrics and that we must critically read archival silences while simultaneously using quantitative models to coerce meaning from data.
