AHR Authors Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen on Digital Text Analysis and US Legal Practice

In this episode of AHR Interview, we speak with Kellen Funk and Lincoln Mullen, the coauthors of an article that appears in the February 2018 issue of the AHR titled, “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” Using archival research and extensive digital text analysis, the authors track the influence of the Field Code, an important New York code of civil procedure enacted in 1848, on the development of 19-century US state law. Kellen Funk has a degree from Yale Law School and is currently a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University. Lincoln Mullen is Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University and researches primarily American religious history but also works extensively on digital historical projects. They spoke with AHR associate editor Konstantin Dierks at this year’s AHA national conference in Washington, DC, about how they came to collaborate on this piece and how both the legal and the digital aspects of the topic speak to a historical audience.