Edgar Franco-Vivanco

Data Science Fellow, Alum

Current Role: Assistant Professor of Political Science, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan

Analysis of historical data, criminal violence, Latin America, Natural language processing

Edgar Franco-Vivanco was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and a faculty associate at the Center for Political Studies. His research interests included Latin American politics, historical political economy, criminal violence, and indigenous politics.

Prof. Franco-Vivanco was interested in implementing machine learning tools to improve the analysis of historical data, in particular handwritten documents. He was also working on the application of text analysis to study indigenous languages. In a parallel research agenda, he explored how marginalized communities interacted with criminal organizations and abusive policing in Latin America. As part of this research, he used NLP tools to identify different types of criminal behavior.

Examples of the digitization process of handwritten documents from colonial Mexico.

Accomplishments and Awards