Department of History

Please join us for a talk by Matthew J. Connelly,

Professor of History, Columbia University

 Monday, September 16, 4:30 p.m. in Smathers East Rm. 1A

 Talk to be followed by a reception

Decoding Official Secrecy:

Computational Analysis of Hundreds of Thousands of Declassified Documents

 
The scope of official secrecy is growing exponentially. The sheer scale of the national security state, the growth of electronic media, and the power that still comes from compartmentalizing information means that the government is only releasing a tiny fraction of the classified information it produces annually. Millions of secret documents are piling up, and millions more are being destroyed or deleted, raising doubts about how we will ever be able to reconstruct the past and ensure government accountability. But historians are now teaming up with data scientists to analyze the documents that are being released, as well as the metadata for still-classified records. Data-mining, in other words, is a tool that citizens can use to track government activity, and not just a tool for government to surveil citizens. It may soon be possible to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy, attribute authorship to anonymous documents, and perhaps even predict the content of redacted text. But the political and ethical questions remain: what does the public need to know, and when do they need to know it?
Matthew J. Connelly specializes in global and international history. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997. He is the author of A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), the winner of multiple awards. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003-2004 and a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship in 2006-2007. He also is the author of Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). His current research examines how forecasting, projections, and future scenarios became indispensible tools of governance and focuses on the most important subjects of prevision: planetary threats of nuclear war, pandemics, and environmental collapse.
Sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UF Libraries, and the History Department