Dallas: Wealth and Inheritance in a Population of Elites, 1890-1950

As a Data Fellow, Shay O’Brien (Ph.D. candidate, Sociology) will examine the interaction between elites’ economic behavior and their social world by developing a dataset of prominent Dallas residents from 1890–1950. Because O’Brien has already assembled much of the quantitative data, including information from Census materials, she plans to use her time with the Center for Digital Humanities to systematically organize qualitative evidence, such as articles from The Dallas Morning News and archival material found in Texas libraries. In doing so, she will engage with important questions about how narrative materials can be transformed into data. The database will serve as the backbone of O’Brien’s dissertation and future work, and will eventually be made available to other scholars studying elites. Shay’s Data Fellowship is co-sponsored with the Data Driven Social Science Initiative.