The Case of the Spanish-Cuban-American War: Using Digital Humanities to Make the Invisible Visible

Abstract

This project analyzes the ways advances in science and technology were translated into narrative and visual form for public consumption during the Spanish-Cuban-American war to persuade them in favor of a U.S. expansionist agenda. To do this, the research focuses on the ways in which science and technology informed the methods by which knowledge was overtly and covertly gathered, represented, and diffused in written and visual form to influence foreign policy. This project utilizes digital-humanities methodology in a large multilingual, transnational corpus of 19th century documents to understand the mechanisms of that influence.