Making Chthonic Networks Visible
By Patrick Hoehne, Ph.D.
Samuel Cluse had not always been a counterfeiter. After his arrest and before his 1841 internment in the Illinois State Penitentiary, Cluse made a detailed confession that was first printed in the Mississippian and then reprinted in The Illinois Free Trader. “I was persuaded to engage in the business,” he insisted, “by Dr. Isaac Young, William Sherwood, and Sandy Young of Prairie Round, Kalamazoo co., Michigan.”[1] He had adapted well to the trade, however, and spent half a decade operating between Michigan and Missouri without detection. As a document, the confession is a rich source of spatial and human data, with Cluse narrating a series of horse thefts, jails breaks, and “bogus” passings that spanned across the Middle West. He named his associates and spoke, even more interestingly, to the degree to which they relied on cooperation and communication to operate.
The confession tells us much about the world that Cluse and his associates navigated. It does not, however, tell us everything. Digging further into the litany of names scattered throughout the document reveals a web of connections stretching well beyond the already impressive scope of the confession itself. A loosely organized but consciously interconnected network of thieves and counterfeiters emerges, mapped onto tangled ties of kinship, association, and convenience.
Patrick Hoehne, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and History at USM. He received his PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he spent several years working on projects affiliated with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
Visualizing and analyzing such a network, the existence of which was generally concealed by its constituents, is no simple task. Digital humanities tools and methods, however, offer avenues to do just that. Tools like GIS allow me to map out both criminal activity and the legal and extralegal responses to that activity. Such tools also allow me to analyze that data layered over census data and reconstructions of travel routes. Another method, network analysis, offers insight into the clusters of human interconnection at the heart of the activity. Far from merely providing nice representations of data, these tools and approaches form an integral part of the research process, helping to address gaps in archival sources and triangulate new leads. The value of these DH tools comes from their capacity to model relationships – spatial, human, or otherwise – in dynamic, interactive, and queryable ways. In tracking how those relationships formed, developed, expanded, and shattered, we have the potential to gain valuable insight not only into the life of Samuel Cluse, but into the larger histories of law, property, and westward expansion in the antebellum United States.
This semester, I joined the University of Southern Mississippi as an assistant professor of history and digital humanities. I am thrilled to be associated with the Center for Digital Humanities here at Southern Miss, which will become the new home for my first DH project, Riot Acts. I look forward to continuing my research into extralegal violence here at the CDH, while beginning this new investigation into the criminal networks of the antebellum Middle West. This spring, I will be teaching HUM 402/502, the Digital Humanities Practicum. This course will offer students hands-on experience with the work of designing and constructing a DH project. Students will spend the semester honing their ability to work with a robust suite of DH tools, and will then apply those tools to tracing, analyzing, and visualizing the criminal networks located through my research.
Cluse finished his confession by stating, somewhat melodramatically, “I hope my example may not be entirely lost on the world.” If we have anything to say about it, it certainly will not be.
[1] “Confession of Samuel B. Cluse,” The Illinois Free Trader, April 29, 1842.
