“We Have This Space Problem”: Quantifying Kissinger

In contrast to the scarcity of archival material many historians face, the deluge of material confronting scholars of the Nixon and Ford administrations poses an 'information overload' problem, one that will increasingly affect historians of the present and future. Combining analyses of the Collection's document content and archival metadata, Micki Kaufman's dissertation, "Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me: Quantifying Kissinger" uses blended digital historical methodologies to attempt to overcome the limitations of scale in an historical text, data and network analysis of the National Security Archive's Kissinger Collection, a curated set of transcripts comprising over 18,600 telephone conversations and memoranda from 1968-1977. Kaufman's computational and presentational approaches illuminate Kissinger's changing White House roles, interactions with colleagues and shifting geopolitical foci. Engaging with the primary source material through a series of computational interfaces, the project surfaces patterns representing and regarding the Vietnam War, triangular diplomacy, internal bureaucracy and the Middle East (as well as his interpersonal relationships with President Nixon and the Soviet Union's Senior Ambassador). The project adds new dimensions to our understanding of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger - conceived, analyzed and rendered in digital form – using visual design, animation, dimensionality and interactivity.