Clemson professor Vernon Burton to address Southern Historical Association meeting

Published: October 30, 2012

Vernon Burton image by: Clemson University

By Kelly Borglum 

CLEMSON — Vernon Burton, director of Clemson University’s CyberInstitute and a professor of history and computer science, will conclude his one-year term as president of the Southern Historical Association with a presidential address at the annual meeting Nov. 1-4 in Mobile, Ala.

Burton’s address, “The South as Other, the Southerner as Stranger” explores the idea of Southern exceptionalism and argues that distortion of Southern history and stereotypes about the South have played important roles in shaping American society.

At Clemson, Burton has leveraged his unique combined expertise of history and computer science to conduct quantitative research into his ideas about the “exceptional South.” A renowned Lincoln scholar, he and his CyberInstitute team are developing an algorithm to make examination of massive numbers of scholarly works possible.

They are working on a search tool for researchers to see which geographic locations were most closely associated with a certain word or phrase during a selected time period. Users will enter a word into the program and a select a time period to generate maps, showing which locations were most closely linked to the word during that time.

“My goal is to explore how attitudes expressed in print about slavery, Southerners,and non-Southerners have changed over time,” Burton said.

Another of Burton’s digital media experiments involved analyzing Google searches related to the South. Many of the most popular search terms linked to Southern people and states were related to common stereotypes about the region. Burton thinks these stereotypes play a role in shaping people’s perspectives. 

One timely area of Burton’s research is his study of racial minorities and voting trends in the South. His address will discuss how race relations affect minority voting and selection of a political party, specifically the Democratic and Republican parties.

Vernon Burton has received numerous awards and honors for his teaching and research on the American South. He obtained his Ph.D. in American history from Princeton and began teaching at Clemson in 2010. Recently, Burton’s “Southern Identity” class was filmed and aired on C-Span.

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The Southern Historical Association
The Southern Historical Association, organized in 1934, promotes interest and research in Southern history and supports the collection and preservation of the South's historical records. The association publishes the Journal of Southern History, which is circulated quarterly to more than 5,000 members and libraries in the United States and foreign countries.

Clemson University CyberInstitute
The Clemson University CyberInstitute serves as an incubator of transdisciplinary research, empowering students, researchers and educators in South Carolina and nationally to contribute and compete in today’s knowledge-based economy. Connecting the private sector with Clemson University’s talent and initiatives, the CyberInstitute capitalizes on Clemson University’s world-class expertise in cyberinfrastructure to drive innovation and build research and educational programs that address the challenges of the 21st century.