Michael Dozler: cutting edge digital archiving
At the suggestion of his chair, Dozler applied for a UCARE grant to work on an extensive archiving project with professor Douglas Seefeldt. With the professor’s guidance, Dozler helped digitize Jeffersonian era maps—the very maps that Thomas Jefferson would have looked to for the first representations of the American West. The research team gathered maps that Jefferson would have had access to, digitized them, and compared them to journals and other documents, in order to gain a clearer sense of how Jefferson and his peers viewed the West.
“We were able to lay old maps over modern lines of latitude and longitude to uncover how accurate they were, and what kinds of information was hidden in the documents,” Dozler said. “A lot of researchers don’t consider using maps to uncover information, but maps are filled with all kinds of hidden notations and interpretations that can be really valuable.”
This year, Dozler is applying the template Seefeldt created to his own research, a case study of Turkey and its application to the European Union. He is uncovering the formal and informal forces that hinder admission into the EU, by collecting relevant documents from Turkey and the EU that outline procedures and policies for integration.
Dozler will graduate in May 2008, and has applied for a Fulbright grant to research intergovernmental organizations in Europe. In particular, he wants to understand how organizations such as the EU, NATO and the Council of Europe cooperate and reinforce each other in member states and potential member states. If he receives the Fulbright grant, his research will focus on Spain and Latvia. Looking beyond the Fulbright year, Dozler plans to pursue a master’s degree in international relations. He will take the skills he has learned in his UCARE project with him into his future endeavors.
“Digital archiving technology is becoming increasingly important in a lot of history departments,” he said. “We are moving away from dated notion that historians spend hours in dusty archives looking at books; we’re taking research to the modern age, using the technology we have to make history more accessible.”
