This project is the first comprehensive examination of African North Americans who crossed one of the U.S.-Canada borders, going either direction, after the Underground Railroad, in the generation alive roughly 1865-1930. It analyzes census and other records to match individuals and families across the decades, despite changes or ambiguities in their names, ages, “color,” birthplace, or other details. The main difficulty in making these matches is that the census data for people with a confirmed identity does not stay uniform decade after decade. Someone might be recorded not with their given name but instead a nickname (Elizabeth to Betsy); women can marry or get remarried and change their names; racial measures by a census taker may change (black to mulatto, or mulatto to white); someone might say they are from Canada, even when they were born in Kentucky, depending on how the question was asked; people who were estimating their ages might be 35 in 1870 and 40 in 1880 and 50 in 1890, for example.

To date, approximately 1,000 matches have been manually generated in a database of 50,000 records, and another 1,000 have been found through my partnership with the Columbia University Data Science Institute Data for Good initiative. Matches were made by looking first at the calculated birth year, then at the name given, location, place of birth, and sometimes at household members. Finding an algorithmic way to predict and identify these matches will allow these records to be paired with other sources, such as government pension data, and will factor into research on migration patterns, specific families, and nodes - whether personal or geographic — that tie these African North American groups together.

Current goals include:

• Continuing to add data by scraping census data in US and Canadian censuses from online databases, and OCR conversion and data cleaning from research notes created through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
• Ongoing ways to predict or confirm matches in the data, likely using confidence factors based on name, birth year, family structure, and/or location. 

This project is the first comprehensive examination of African North Americans who crossed one of the U.S.-Canada borders, going either direction, after the Underground Railroad, in the generation alive roughly 1865-1930. It analyzes census and other records to match individuals and families across the decades, despite changes or ambiguities in their names, ages, “color,” birthplace, or other details. The main difficulty in making these matches is that the census data for people with a confirmed identity does not stay uniform decade after decade. Someone might be recorded not with their given name but instead a nickname (Elizabeth to Betsy); women can marry or get remarried and change their names; racial measures by a census taker may change (black to mulatto, or mulatto to white); someone might say they are from Canada, even when they were born in Kentucky, depending on how the question was asked; people who were estimating their ages might be 35 in 1870 and 40 in 1880 and 50 in 1890, for example.

To date, approximately 1,000 matches have been manually generated in a database of 50,000 records, and another 1,000 have been found through my partnership with the Columbia University Data Science Institute Data for Good initiative. Matches were made by looking first at the calculated birth year, then at the name given, location, place of birth, and sometimes at household members. Finding an algorithmic way to predict and identify these matches will allow these records to be paired with other sources, such as government pension data, and will factor into research on migration patterns, specific families, and nodes - whether personal or geographic — that tie these African North American groups together.

Current goals include:

• Continuing to add data by scraping census data in US and Canadian censuses from online databases, and OCR conversion and data cleaning from research notes created through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
• Ongoing ways to predict or confirm matches in the data, likely using confidence factors based on name, birth year, family structure, and/or location. 

This project is the first comprehensive examination of African North Americans who crossed one of the U.S.-Canada borders, going either direction, after the Underground Railroad, in the generation alive roughly 1865-1930. It analyzes census and other records to match individuals and families across the decades, despite changes or ambiguities in their names, ages, “color,” birthplace, or other details. The main difficulty in making these matches is that the census data for people with a confirmed identity does not stay uniform decade after decade. Someone might be recorded not with their given name but instead a nickname (Elizabeth to Betsy); women can marry or get remarried and change their names; racial measures by a census taker may change (black to mulatto, or mulatto to white); someone might say they are from Canada, even when they were born in Kentucky, depending on how the question was asked; people who were estimating their ages might be 35 in 1870 and 40 in 1880 and 50 in 1890, for example.

To date, approximately 1,000 matches have been manually generated in a database of 50,000 records, and another 1,000 have been found through my partnership with the Columbia University Data Science Institute Data for Good initiative. Matches were made by looking first at the calculated birth year, then at the name given, location, place of birth, and sometimes at household members. Finding an algorithmic way to predict and identify these matches will allow these records to be paired with other sources, such as government pension data, and will factor into research on migration patterns, specific families, and nodes - whether personal or geographic — that tie these African North American groups together.

Current goals include:

• Continuing to add data by scraping census data in US and Canadian censuses from online databases, and OCR conversion and data cleaning from research notes created through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
• Ongoing ways to predict or confirm matches in the data, likely using confidence factors based on name, birth year, family structure, and/or location. 

I seek research partners to examine the elusive British "guerrilla" graffiti artist Banksy’s street art in New York City and his wall art as well as the new Walled Off installation-hotel in Bethlehem, Palestine. Banksy’s work in/ on Palestine toward the end of the last decade has put Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for freedom at the center of the international solidarity movement and the international art scene, to the extent that a burgeoning tourist industry has mushroomed in Palestine especially, the Bethlehem area, around his wall art. In his work, Banksy connected the Palestinian struggle to other global spaces through his intricate system of motifs, ciphers, and self-citations. Moreover, quite a few of his New York motifs reappear in his work in Bethlehem.  

The aim of this project is to investigate and analyze the extent to which Banksy’s work in New York and Bethlehem is a function of the totality of his artwork as an overarching semiotic system, in which signs circulate within an intricate system of intertextual and intratextual references. Moreover, the project seeks to explore the extent to which Banksy uses his system of ciphers and signifiers to link the Palestinian struggle overtly to the struggles of other disposable communities in the global neoliberal capitalist system especially, in New York city.