What are digital tools good for? Sean Fraga uses three recent research projects to show how digital approaches can offer fresh insights into Pacific Northwest history. Digital mapping helps us understand the scale of the turn-of-the-century mosquito fleet steamboat network. Data visualization lets us investigate how maritime mobility at different scales drove Anglo-American colonization during the Fraser River gold rush. Augmented reality creates new ways of exploring digitized archival materials, by bringing them off of flat screens and into the real world, offering 

Fraga is a former Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities in a Digital World program at the University of Southern California, and now teaches in USC’s Environmental Studies Program. His book project, Ocean Fever: Steam Power, Transpacific Trade, and American Colonization of Puget Sound, is under contract with Yale University Press.