Expertise Summary

Expert in links between the environment, Indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, technology and mobility, primarily during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Additional Information

• Fraga is creator and project director of Booksnake (booksnake.app), a free scholarly app for iPhone and iPad that uses augmented reality to bring digitized archival materials (maps, manuscripts, newspapers and books) into physical space at life size. The app offers access to millions of items from the Library of Congress. Its methods are described in Digital Humanities Quarterly (Winter 2025). Fraga and colleagues hold a U.S. patent (2024) for a method of automatically transforming digital images of archival materials into dimensionally accurate virtual objects.
• Fraga’s book, Ocean Fever: Steam Power, Transpacific Trade, and American Colonization of Puget Sound, is under contract with Yale University Press (Lamar Series in Western History). His scholarly research has been published in Western Historical Quarterly, Mobilities, Current Research in Digital History and Digital Humanities Quarterly. His writing has also appeared in The Washington Post.
• Fraga has been invited to share his research and digital humanities work at the Library of Congress, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, the American Philosophical Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society, among others.