Event Details

Join the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental Digital Humanities Seminar for a lunchtime talk from Elizabeth Hameeteman (TU Berlin).

Abstract:

During my Gale-ESEH Non-Residential Fellowship in Digital Environmental History, I explored how digital tools can expand archival research on the history of desalination. Until then, my work relied mostly on traditional archival practices: following paper trails, taking notes by hand, and reconstructing stories from scattered documents. The fellowship invited me to try a different approach.

Using Gale’s collections and the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, I examined how desalination was promoted as a postwar development strategy across colonial and postcolonial contexts. Rather than working within a single archive, I could move across newspapers, government publications, and institutional reports from multiple regions and languages. Tools such as ngram analysis, entity recognition, and topic modeling highlighted recurring terms like “development” and “modernization,” while also drawing my attention to silences — moments when desalination might have been expected but was absent from the record.

The project’s initial scope was intentionally broad, designed to see what themes and connections might emerge: tracing how colonial powers promoted desalination in overseas territories and how newly independent states later adopted it as part of their strategies for sovereignty and growth. At stake were questions about politics and technological choice: why governments invested in desalination, what promises it carried, and how these visions circulated in the postwar world. Yet what proved most transformative was not the data itself but what surfaced between the lines.

Among the documents I encountered — though not directly tied to my original case study — was a 1959 White House memo on a desalination project in Tunisia. I knew the project, but the memo revealed US involvement was deeper that I had thought. It prompted me to reflect on the political logics of desalination in newly independent states and, more significantly, led me to a broader realization: solar desalination — a once-promising but ultimately sidelined technology — remains critically underexplored.

What began broadly became a launching point for a more focused trajectory on this history. This new direction emerged from the fellowship’s space for reflection, highlighting how digital methods can not only reveal new sources but also open pathways to rethink overlooked futures.