Catching a colonial criminal sometimes requires some analytical thinking. In Healy’s article “Using Metadata to find Paul Revere,” we see how using some simple matrix arithmetic we can use existing data to quickly and effectively see relations between the data. By multiplying the transpose of an individual v. group matrix by the original matrix, you get a matrix showing the number of connections between each two groups.

This article was witty and folksy, but also was very good at finding a balance between explaining the data well and concisely and making it clear. I thought the author explained the material well, and I thought the material was really interesting. The applied math really showed how connections can be made in large sets of data. Overall, I felt the article was very well done.

After reading Using Metadata to find Paul Revere I learned about the effectiveness of simple social network analysis.  The data was gathered from David Haskett Fischer and was mostly lists of committee members.  Next, the author compiled a “Person by Person” matrix to indicate relationships between people.  People are linked through the groups they belong too and groups are linked by the people they share.  After analysis of the amount of connections different people had Paul Revere appeared to score very highly. Thus, the analysis found Paul Revere!  This showed that using network analysis will help pick out important people arithmetically. Had Paul Revere not been a household name, this would have showed he had a significant presence during the period.

I believe this related closely with the six degrees of Francis Bacon because they both showed that important people can be found using unbiased network analysis. This technique has tons of interesting applications.

I also found the post Paul Revere’s Social Life by SJ very interesting. SJ wrote “This made me think about how individuals use metadata in our every day lives in order to obtain information about people that we do not personally know.” It is interesting to think that the way we here of people can be applied to so many different applications from Facebook to 1500s historical texts.

In the article “Using Metadata to find Paul Revere”, the author simplifies how to find connections between individuals and organizations. Although a social network has the potential has the potential to be incredibly complex, Healy emphasizes that a simple piece of information such as a man’s enrollment in a school, can help find the crossroad of not only individuals that went to the given institution, but also the relationship between the multiple institutions. He describes how little information about an individual can solve complex questions. “The foundational papers in this new science of social network analysis, in fact, are almost all about what you can tell about people and their social lives based on metadata only, without much reference to the actual content of what they say.”

The study “Continuity and Disruption in European Networks of Print Production, 1550-1750” takes what is mentioned above to a whole new level. The computational analysis of art to then use as social networking for painters in the Netherlands shows how far we’ve come in data cultures. The study not only finds trends between artists but finds whether popular artists set trends in the 17th century. Its always been known that the best artists can influence style and skill shifts in the world of art, but this computational analysis program allows us to find who, when, where and what exactly is shaping the artistic world.

JM mentioned something very relevant to these texts. She stated that “the problem with history is that people need to understand that everything that is written down comes from a perspective”. The past is very complex. The majority of history is proven to not have been recorded the way it actually was so it is vital for us to consider this when analyzing answers presented by a computer. Computers are smart, yet they can’t grasp the complexity of humanity’s flaws.

I thought this article was extremely intriguing in which it made me think about how ordinary individuals use metadata in order to establish ideas about others. In this article, Using Metadata to find Paul Revere, the author demonstrates that it is possible to gain an understanding of Revere’s social network simply based on recorded data that describes his membership to groups and places. This made me think about how individuals use metadata in our every day lives in order to obtain information about people that we do not personally know. Presently, social media provides a significant amount of information pertaining to the types of posts people like, and the social groups that people are apart of. This metadata allows us to gain some insight about an individual, even if you have never made personal contact with him or her. BL adds that this data is important because of the network visualization that is produced. I would be interested in collecting data from social media pages and formulating a similar social network using the same processes.

This article was a really cool example showing the impact that data visualization on a given analysis. The author of this article used a web/network type structure to show the results of certain connections of a general matrix through links. Through this analysis, he was able to create a “social” network between certain people who lived over 200 years ago. We discovered, through this largely exploratory analysis, that Paul Revere was at the center of this network. He could also do this using centrality scores, which is a useful metric that I learned from this article as well. Similar to my colleague’s response to last week’s article, some of the statistical results were slightly confusing, but I understand the methodology for the most part for the analysis. I’d be interested in pursuing using centrality scores and these types of networks in some of our notebooks!

In the article, “A Report HasCome Here,” the purpose was to analyze the challenges that historians face when trying to uncover life during slavery. One of my peers mentioned that, “many people during that time did not know how to read and write, causing for a lack in written history evidence.” I agree with this statement, but I think that that could be said for a lot of horrific events during world history. For example, during the Holocaust or big bombings, there was not a lot of evidence or writings left behind for historians to read and get a genuine account for everything that happened. This study can and should be used for other events throughout history so that we can get a better idea of the information that has been lost.

Without the discipline of history, stories, events, and personal narratives would never be exposed to different parts of the world and different groups of people. History and the retelling of what happened in the past is the only way to help build a better future. However, the problem with history is that people need to understand that everything that is written down comes from a perspective. In order to become more knowledgable about different subjects people need to question what is written and the audience they are talking to. For example, from a Patriotic/American revolution perspective Thomas Jefferson is highly regarded as not only a founding father to the declaration but also improved out international relations with France. Although Jefferson is very crucial to the success of the foundation of America that does not mean his behavior and hiring hundreds of slaves on his property should go unnoticed. Even “heroes” faults and poor decision making should be exploited in order for people to learn the truth and make perspectives on their own. In the blog “making silence visible” blog relates to my point about learning the truth about history and how “absent” information is the worst thing for peoples perspective to be skewed.

“A Report Has Come Here”

Lauren Klein brings up a very pertinent question on how scholars account for absences in the archival record. Interested in revealing the absence of information regarding Jefferson’s head Chef, James Hemings, she creates an arc diagram to visualize the people with whom Jefferson corresponded with about Hemings. Klein discovers through this diagram a little bit more about Hemings’ life such as his suicide but concludes that “we realise just how little about the life of James Hemings we will ever truly know.”

In some ways, the work we’ve been doing with the Lewiston workers interviews is rendering the silences of these workers visible. Whilst, these interviews exist in the world, there is a need to go through them and analyze them, to uncover more information. The data currently exists, but nothing is being made of it in trying to understand the secrets of these workers and the factories they worked at. Through our final project I hope to illuminate the past and inform the present; by understanding how the local residents treated and perceived the French immigrants back then, to inform the present in regards to the treatment of immigrant African communities in L/A. Having a better understanding of the past, and more public/visible information about it, will perhaps help avoid the mistakes that were made.

An article that reinforced this idea of the importance of data from the past and how they can inform the present is “Truth and Reconciliation: Archivists as Reparations Activisits”, by Anna Robinson-Sweet. She explores the relationships that requires archivists to take on the role of reparations activists in the campaign for black reparations in the U.S. An article published this year, a lot more momentum is driving this movement of challenging scholars and archivists in the way they collect, understand and analyze knowledge of the past.

This article illustrated a new way to visualize data. The article made an interesting point based on the holes within slavery history, that many people during that time did not know how to read and write, causing for a lack in written history evidence. Klein describes her use of visualization to organize and present the data from that time period, which was an alternative way of depicting the history and its data. Even with holes within the history, an onlooker would be able to understand that data.