This Round Table panel (chaired by Alex Bolucki of SlaveVoyages.org) consists of two teams of historians and STEM professors: historian of Latin America Cameron Jones who collaborates with computer scientist Foaad Khosmood and Cold War historian Greg Domber who works with statistician Kelly Bodwin. Together these teams will provide tips and lessons on how to locate potential collaborators on the other side of campus as well as lessons from the roadblocks and hiccups they have encountered, from teambuilding, to procuring funding, to utilizing student labor, to meshing research schedules, to the specifics of data gathering, cleaning, and analysis. Both teams will also provide short synopses of their ongoing Digital History projects.

All four participants work at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly), a primarily undergraduate, teaching focused campus that is part of the California State University system. Dr. Khosmood and Dr. Jones are currently at work on African Californios.org, a website that highlights the lives and family ties of Afro-descendants in Spanish and Mexican California. This site utilizes data from various mission records to create data visualizations such as family trees and maps. The site is designed to aid the public in understanding the roles Africans played in the creation of California from Spanish colonization to statehood. Dr. Bodwin and Dr. Domber collaborate on “Mapping the Indefinable: Using Social Network Analysis to Understand East-West Exchanges’ Influence on Poland’s Democratic Transformation.” This project uses social network analysis of two purpose-built relational data sets (one of the participants in Poland’s Round Table negotiations in 1989 and one of Polish participants in East-West exchanges funded by the United States) to longitudinally visualize and measure the pathways for American influence within elite, Polish epistemic communities.