Locating Biographies of Canadian and Native American Women:  Nationality, Race, and Mobility in North America

1. Abstract

As part of the next phase of Collective Biographies of Women (CBW), this paper focuses on E. Pauline Johnson as an example of representation of Canadian and Native American women in this database of 1272 books, 8372 persons, and 14,185 chapter-length biographies. The talk explains the team's digital methods for visualizing spatial data in collective biographies of individuals and cohorts. Interpretation of the historical and ideological contexts, the paper shows, is a necessary framework for reading the significance of spatial data, life paths, and the typologies such as nationality assigned by the printed biographies or the research database. Movement in space is structured by power and historical change: shaped by restrictions on women, people of color, events such as war, shifting national boundaries, and changing means of travel.