William J. Turkel

- Professor

image of William J. Turkel
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 2004
Email: wturkel@uwo.ca
Office: Lawson Hall 2267
Office Hours via Zoom: By Appointment

On sabbatical from July 1, 2024 - June 30, 2025 

Research and Teaching

Professor Turkel is a Professor of History at The University of Western Ontario in Canada and a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada (2018-25). His research involves computational history, big history, and science and technology studies (STS) with a focus on methods. Two of his new projects focus specifically on (1) electronics, sound, and esoterica in modular synthesis; and (2) a disability studies / disability history approach to astrobiology and security studies. He is engaged in a number of ongoing research collaborations in digital history with Tim Hitchcock, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Rob MacDougall, and others. In his work, he often use historical experimentation and reverse engineering to create material objects, typically drawing on mechanical design, 3D printing, and electronics or minimal computing. As part of this research, he has built a series of 3D printers and other CNC tools, and have reverse engineered the vacuum-tube-based computers of the 1930s, 40s and 50s using the transistors and analog integrated circuits that became available a generation later.

Professor Turkel is the author of Spark from the Deep (JHU 2013) and The Archive of Place (UBC 2007). The second revised edition of his open access, open content and open source textbook Digital Research Methods with Mathematica (2020) can be downloaded from williamjturkel.net

In the fall semester this academic year (2023-24), Professor Turkel will be teaching a third-year course on global 21st-century history (History 3823) and a cross-listed undergraduate/graduate course on digital research methods using Mathematica (History 4816). In the winter semester, he will be teaching a graduate studio/seminar on interactive exhibits, disability, and design justice (History 9832), and a fourth-year course called “Spy vs Spy” that is designed to teach collaborative close reading and the techniques of structured intelligence analysis (History 4821). He is planning to be on sabbatical in 2024-25.

Professor Turkel continues to collaborate with colleagues and students applying methods like experimentation, text mining, and machine learning to historical research.

Professor Turkel is currently working with Uesio da Gama Santos, Charankamal Mandur, Erin Lee Isaac, Mary Baxter, James Caldwell, Charlie Christensen, Bethany Cheung, and Dani Paul. Past students he has worked with include Jennifer Bonnell, M Blake Butler, Adam Crymble, Julia D’Alessandro, Mridula Debnath, John Tyler Drew, Jaylen ‘Ace’ Edwards, Devon Elliott, Jennifer Hambleton, Tristan Johnson, Jeffrey Lupker, Kimberley Martin, Shezan Muhammedi, Allen Priest, Zain Sirohey, Mary Beth Start, and Rebecca Woods. Ian Milligan and Daniel Rueck are former postdocs. These students have worked on a variety of subjects including the history and technology of stage magic, exoskeleton patents, case studies in intelligence analysis, machine-generated music and art, the CIA’s MK ULTRA project, DIY and the Maker movement, 9/11 in historical consciousness, the historical relationship between studies of autism and artificial intelligence, and a number of other fun topics. Professor Turkel is happy to discuss research opportunities with potential students and collaborators any time.

There is a lot more information about his work on his personal webpage (williamjturkel.net) and his open source code is on GitHub

Selected Publications

Monographs

  • W. J. Turkel. Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
  • W. J. Turkel. The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

 Editions

  • Alan MacEachern and W. J. Turkel, eds. Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental History. Toronto: Nelson Education, 2008.

 Open Access Textbooks

  •  W. J. Turkel. Digital Research Methods with Mathematica, 2nd rev. ed. 2020.

 Selected Peer Reviewed Articles and Chapters

  • Niels Brügger, Ian Milligan, Anat Ben-David, Sophie Gebeil, Federico Nanni, Richard Rogers, William J. Turkel, Matthew Weber and Peter Webster. “Internet Histories and Computational Methods: A ‘Round-Doc’ Discussion.” Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (2019). Reprinted in Oral Histories of the Internet and the Web, edited by Niels Brügger and Gerard Goggin. Routledge, 2023.
  • F. Michael Bartlett and W. J. Turkel. “Digital Analysis of Historic Bridge Images.” Artificial Intelligence: New Pathways Towards Cultural Heritage: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT 25, 2020), edited by Wolfgang Börner, Hendrik Rohland, Christina Kral-Börner, and Lina Karner, 13-21. Heidelberg, Germany: Heidelberg University, Propylaeum, 2022.
  • Jeffrey A. T. Lupker and W. J. Turkel. “Music Theory, the Missing Link Between Music-Related Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 15, no 1., special issue on Audiovisual DH (2021).
  • Jeffrey A. T. Lupker and W. J. Turkel. “Observing Mood Based Patterns and Commonalities in Music.” Innovation in Music (2019 edition), edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Justin Paterson, and Rob Toulson. (Taylor and Francis, 2021).
  • W. J. Turkel and Edward Jones-Imhotep. “Sensors and Sources: How a Universal Model of Instrumentation Affects Our Experiences of the Past.” Varieties of Historical Experience, edited by Charles Stewart and Stephan Palmie. Routledge, 2019.
  • Edward Jones-Imhotep and W. J. Turkel. “The Analog Archive: Image-Mining the History of Electronics.” Seeing the Past with Computers: Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History, edited by Kevin Kee and Timothy Compeau. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.
  • Devon Elliott and W. J. Turkel. “Faster than the Eye: Using Computer Vision to Explore Sources in the History of Stage Magic.” Seeing the Past with Computers: Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History, edited by Kevin Kee and Timothy Compeau. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019.

 Recent Conference Presentations

  • Allen Priest and W. J. Turkel. “What Causes Contemporary Facial Recognition Systems to Misclassify Historical Photographic Portraits? An Investigation of Facial Landmarks, Pose, and Subject Age.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Conference. (Online). June 2023.
  • Charankamal Mandur and W. J. Turkel. “Studying Direct-to-Consumer Television Advertising at Scale Using Mismatched Text and Video Descriptors.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Conference. (Online). June 2023.
  • Ruramisai Charumbira, Jaylen Edwards and W. J. Turkel. “A Minimal Computing Approach to Building Computational Language Resources for Southern African History.” Global Digital Humanities Symposium. (Online). March 2023.
  • Allen Priest and W. J. Turkel. “Using Contemporary Facial Recognition Systems to Classify Historical Photographic Portraits: Race, Gender and Sexuality.” Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Conference. (Online). June 2022.
  • Uésio Jeremias da Gama Santos and W. J. Turkel. “Compiling a Dataset to Explore the Uses of Autism in English Language TV News, 2009-Present.” DH Unbound (The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities). (Online). May 2022.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Hostile Environments.” Harriet Ritvo Symposium, MIT. Cambridge, MA (Online). April 2022. Invited.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Patching Equations.” Patch-Up! Toronto, ON (Online). April 2022. Invited.
  • Tim Hitchcock and W. J. Turkel. “Studying the Historical Emergence of Manslaughter in English Law using Stable Random Projections and Tag Parameter Spaces.” Association for Computers and the Humanities. (Online). July 2021.
  • F. Michael Bartlett and W. J. Turkel. “Automatically Harvesting High-Quality Images of Historic Bridges.” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. Edmonton, AB (Online). June 2021.
  • Tim Hitchcock and W. J. Turkel. “Using Dimensionality Reduction and Tag Parameter Spaces to Study Historical Change in a Large Document Archive.” Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. Edmonton, AB (Online). June 2021.
  • W. J. Turkel. “How to Read 10K Books.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Fairfax, VA (Online). November 2020. Invited.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Knowledge Infrastructures,” Invited participant, “STS Futures: A Symposium.” York University. Toronto, ON. February 2020. Invited.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Computation and the Practice of 21st-Century History.” Digital History Seminar, MIT. Cambridge, MA. April 2019. Invited.
  • W. J. Turkel. “Realtime Monitoring of the Collective Memory of Events,” Invited participant, “Workshop on Quantitative Analysis and the Digital Turn in Historical Studies.” Fields Institute for Mathematical Studies. Toronto, ON. February-March, 2019. Invited.

 Awards and Distinctions

  • Western Award for Innovations in Technology-Enhanced Teaching, 2021.
  • Member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada, 2018.
  • 2004-14 - Project Director of Digital Infrastructure, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment/ Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l'environnement (SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster)