DH Open Office Hours: Halima Haruna

We were delighted to host the Digital Scholarship Group’s DH Open Office Hours works in progress talk with Halima Haruna, a PhD Student in Northeastern’s History Department and Boston Research Center Research Associate on October 7, 2025! Halima discussed the current state of her dissertation research, which focuses on pensions claims made by African-American Civil War widows. The event was more of a dialogue, rather than a formal talk, as the work is still ongoing.

Her central claim is that ordinary African-American women created networks, petitioned for Civil War pensions, and co-created the modern welfare state.

Halima divided her talk into two sections: the historical argument and the digital methods. She started by providing context to this historical period, specifically Black life during the American Civil War. She noted that one fifth of African-American men served in the Civil War. Due to this, there was a large number of African-American women who became Civil War widows. A central concept for Halima’s research is the idea of fictive kin—communities that are familially connected without being related through blood or marriage.

Prior to 1865, the only people receiving any money from the government were white veterans. Halima highlights the African-American women protesting for inclusion in the welfare system in the 1860s, often through these Civil War pension claims. She argues that the modern welfare state was created, in part, by these pension claims.

Following the historical argument, Halima turned to her use of network analysis to aid in her research and discovery. She began by explaining her process of data collection. She focused on approved pension claims filed by widows of veterans of the 2nd and 33rd regiments of the United States Colored Troops; these claims were filed predominantly from Virginia and South Carolina where these regiments were from. The sources were presented as digital facsimiles, which made OCR not a viable option. There were also many handwritten manuscripts that required manual transcription. Halima explained how she focused her data collection on the data points that were consistent across the records.

Halima created a data dictionary that helped her to track fictive kin relations. She explained that she considered ‘family relation’ in the data in terms of long-term connections and not exclusively family relations. She then used this data to create a network visualization. Unlike many network visualization projects that start with an established bounded community (such as everyone who corresponded with Francis Bacon), Halima utilized network analysis in order to determine the existence of a network. Through her network visualization, she was able to identify closely connected individuals, such as attorneys that represented many different pension claims. Another interesting finding was the presence of reciprocal connections, or two families who testified for each other. She concluded by pointing to next steps, including developing an interactive network visualization. If you are interested in learning more about DH works in progress, the CDS and DSG hosts regular DH Open Office Hours which can be found on the CDS Events page.