Category: Private (Page 6 of 11)

By Eleanor

The interactive map project Geography of the Post maps the opening and closing of post offices in the western part of the United States between 1846-1902. You can choose the specific year(s) that you want to look at, and it will display every post office in action during that time period. It has two viewing modes: “Duration View” in which offices are represented as blue dots with varying degrees of vibrancy depending on how many years in your selection they were operational (longer lifespan = brighter dot), and “Status View”, where the dots are different colors representing their operational status (opened for the first time in this time period, active for the whole duration, closed during these years, etc.).
Personally, I found the Status View to be much more useful than the Duration View for visualizing post office activity. It was easier to distinguish between the different status conditions, especially on more crowded maps.

Currently, the only geographical data on the map is modern state outlines. I think that this map project would be more useful to a wider audience if it had geographical features (mountains, rivers, etc.) and maybe even major cities marked on it as well. This would allow viewers who weren’t familiar with western settlement patterns or the geography of the American West to situate the data displayed in the real world. It would also allow us to better analyze settlement and postal system growth by giving it the context of the world in which it existed. For example, there are two linear clusters of offices that develop very early on and I would be interesting in knowing if they were perhaps along rivers.

By Kurt Vidmer

In class last Tuesday, my group (Group C) worked with a map that tracked the time, distance, and speed of trains traveling to and from New York city from various locations. This collection contained maps from many different years, but we chose to focus on the maps from the years 1800, 1830, and 1857. After analyzing the three different maps, our group came up with two main conclusion.

As Avery pointed out, there was a large jump from the year 1830 to the year 1857. During this 27 year span, travel times decreased a great amount. For example, from where I grew up in Northeast Ohio, it would have taken me roughly a week and a day to to travel to New York in 1830. However, in the year 1857, it only would have taken me about a day to travel this distance. This completely changes the way in which Americans could view and space, and greatly increase the efficiency of travel to various places.

Our other main finding was again looking at a key difference between the 1830 and 1857 map. In the map of 1830, the map only showed the railroads reaching the eastern tip of the midwest. However, in the map of 1857, it shows the railroads reaching all the way to pacific. This paints a clear picture of how railroad expansion opened the country up to everyone.

We did however have some questions that the maps could not answer for us. First, we were wondering if this map dealt primarily with commercial shipping, or personal transit and travel. Also, we would have liked to know whether or not the experience a train ride chained dramatically with the change in travel times being so great.

Overall these maps served as a very intriguing and informative way to gain knowledge about railroad expansion and their impact on the country.

By admin

As an extremely visual learner, I found this experience with mapping to be a breath of fresh air in an otherwise data-heavy subject. Many of the historical sources we have thus far explored have been full of information which I must work to visually conceptualize before storing it in my mind. However, the shipping data that historian Ben Schmidt’s explores in “Reading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs” has made this intermediate step unnecessary. However, Schmidt did not take on this mammoth project simply to make historical shipping data accessible to people like me. His motivation for the project, he writes, “is that a medium-sized data set like Maury’s 19th century logs (with ‘merely’ millions of points) lets us think through in microcosm the general problems of reading historical data.” In other words, the challenges posed by the assembly, presentation, and interpretation of this particular set of data can be applied to the entire venture of historical research. For example, I can conclude that the challenge of compiling millions of data from handwritten shipping logs is an example of the bigger problem that historians face: how to cull quantitative data from homemade or handwritten primary sources.

I found one of Schmidt’s arguments for the use of technical models in historical research very interesting. He notes that historians are motivated primarily by something called situated argumentation, in which the historian ties the data he collects to answering a question in their field that is under debate. Schmidt contends that the more important contribution of the historian is their assembly and unbiased interpretation of the evidence. I infer, then, that this is the theory behind Schmidt’s argument for digitization. And when data assembly is so important, why not use the most powerful, streamlined tools for this task? However, this leaves me with several questions. First, if the historian’s most important job is to collect and present the information, what do we call the people who interpret that data? Second, why assemble data for the sake of assembling data – isn’t the “so what?” question, the participation in the discussion of live question, what makes history a worthwhile subject?

In regard to the end result of Schmidt’s map project, I found it to be easy to understand and visually engaging. I particularly appreciated the first still-frame map, because it has a very artistic element. At first glance, I read only the dark markings (which trace the paths of American whaling ships from 1830 to 1855) and did not process the white information as continental outlines. This added aesthetic dimension makes it the data more interesting than it would be, were it described in a paragraph or a data table.

By Cordelia

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience that was exploring the “Geography of the Post” digital map created by Stanford University. I found that the Status View of the map was much more helpful than the Duration View in terms of taking advantage of the information presented by the map. The Duration View was harder to distinguish the separate spans of time, as the shades of teal were difficult to tell apart from each other and therefore, much of the information was lost. Yet, with the Status View, post offices could be easily distinguished and the same information is present with the use of the adjustable timeline.

What I liked the most about this map, however, was the ability to view historical events as they happen through the establishment of post offices. For example, the California Gold Rush is suddenly visible, as is the great Mormon migration to Utah. This is, arguably, the true purpose of the map, unless one were to conduct research on actual post office establishments and closings. Post Offices represent a settlement’s ability to communicate, survive, and be a part of the nation so, post offices are completely representative of a settlement and a map of them can, therefore, showcase the growth of the west.

I agree with what Alec mentions regarding the right, eastern half of the United States. Although leaving this section of the map blank doesn’t change the usefulness of the map, as its entire purpose lies in the illustration of the west, it is slightly eerie and can cause confusion. I would, therefore, suggest to fill in the east, or just get rid of that part of the map. It really serves no purpose as the audience this map is reaching will be well acquainted of what the United States looks like and can figure out that the eastern half is missing. I also agree with the idea that Alec mentioned and that we mentioned in our discussion in class that including natural features such as rivers or mountain ranges could benefit this map. It would add a higher level of focus to identifying city locations as well as provide insight as to possible motivations behind settlement locations. As most features of this digital map can be toggled on and off, this could easily be done for this feature as well.

As I stated before, I really enjoyed this map and found it to be very insightful and an interesting medium through which to navigate the westward expansion of America.

By Sherwood

Many of the challenges that I encountered while working on my final project have involved reconciling historical ambiguities with a platform that demands precision. Google Maps was built by computer scientists and expert cartographers. Conversely, Neatline was built by humanists, who regularly encounter unreliable data when working with primary sources. Something else that appeals to me about Neatline is its emphasis on narrative. The user interface affords historians the opportunity to contextualize their map with written information. In my application, this section could the display primary sources that I used to derive railroad routes. A visualization like “Journalism’s Journey West” or “Geography of the Post,” which Alec critiqued in his post, could really benefit from Neatline’s user interface, which is both aesthetically appealing and fully functional. Conversely, the user interface in both “Journalism’s Journey West” and “Geography of the Post” detracts from the educational experience by being overly complex and unintuitive.

Unfortunately, getting Neatline up and running requires a significant amount of preconfiguration. Most importantly, you need to have Omeka running, since Neatline is an Omeka plugin. I only got as far as installing the LAMP stack that Omeka runs on, a software architecture model that uses the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP programming language. Afterwards, I downloaded the Omeka source files and placed them in my Apache server. When I initiated the local server, I was able to view the Omeka page. Unfortunately, it showed an error without any error log, so I wasn’t able to continue.

There are tools out there that make web development insanely easy and accessible to non-developers. For example, there’s WordPress, Heroku and GoDaddy. However, Neatline and Omeka are not among them. My main criticism of these tools is that no historian could realistically use them on his own, without undergoing considerable training beforehand. As a result, Omeka doesn’t quite bridge the gap between humanities and the internet, and Neatline doesn’t exactly make graphical history easy, like Nowviskie claims it does. There’s still a considerable learning curve associated with both technologies.

I would be impressed if any of my classmates were able to effectively use either in their final project. Personally, I have found it easier to build an application from scratch.

By Avery

Group C looked at this map displaying how travel times changed during the 19^th century. The most notable increase in speed and areas served by rail occurs between 1830 and 1857. The graphic emphasizes the jump because the area of train service is set up as an overlay that cuts off where rail service cuts off. Thus, one can see how much rail service literally expanded people’s worlds by making distance places more accessible. It’s a striking way to visualize world view.

One confusing part of the graphic is that it doesn’t explain the way the atlas calculates speed of travel. There are huge discrepancies in travel speed around the country, but they don’t totally seem to correspond with rough geography. It is also unclear whether the speed averages take stops into account or if stops are removed as outliers.

Additionally, our group felt that the map lacked two key descriptive aspects. First, the map does not state whether the trains pictured are passenger, freight, or a mix of both. This is important to know because being able to get goods from a far off place is different from being able to travel (for leisure or business) to that far off place. Second, the map doesn’t have any information about how the experience of riding a train changes over the time periods. Did people stay on a train for six weeks straight when going from the East to the West Coast? Were passenger trains comfortable? It would be helpful to have this information in another tab on the website to gain a fuller understanding of the changes taking place in rail travel. For example, Sherwood’s historiography of rail companies and other analyses of that type would be a great addition to the website, just to add some verbal context to the visual.

By Alec

By Dr. Shrout

This week was largely concerned with the African-American public sphere, and the ways in which participating in that sphere could be useful for people otherwise excluded from formal politics, but who did not want to, or could not, engage in violent rebellion.

The question of whether the public sphere is a useful concept, or whether having a public sphere was useful to enslaved and free people of color, was of concern to both Sherwood and Carolyn. Sherwood – who was initially unimpressed by Habermas’s arguments – was persuaded of their applicability to this particular case. Carolyn was also persuaded, but raised concerns about the viability of Newman’s argument, given his occasionally bombastic language.

Avery linked the reading to our past discussions of autonomy and Native print culture. I would encourage everyone to consider the viability of the concept of the public sphere to other situations we’ve discussed – and particularly to American Indian print culture – and to query the utility of “the public sphere” as a concept going forward. In what situations is it useful? Less useful?

By admin

Richard Newman’s arguments for how a culture of print, especially pamphleteering, allowed the oppressed black minority to have access to the public sphere, were for the most part, presented without bias. He discusses with neutral language how print “allowed black views to be heard while also forcing white society at large to reconsider its justification of bondage” (182). However, I stumbled over his choice of words near the beginning of the article, when he introduces the concept of the public sphere. He claims that the print sphere offered room for black views, and that “Southern legislators and politicians discovered this unpleasant fact in 1830″ (181).

I tripped over the choice of the word “unpleasant” in describing the opportunity for black expression. When I re-read the sentence, I understood that Newman means that to the aforementioned white political elite, this was an unpleasant reality. However, he does not make this context clear in the construction of the sentence. Instead, the adjective is simply thrown in, as though it were Newman’s personal opinion that this opportunity was unpleasant. Considering that the framing of history is almost as important to an argument as the facts presented, this is an unfortunate mistake. A reader might even mistake this shakily constructed sentence as a slip that reveals bias of the author.

Continuing in the vein of diction, I also stumbled over another word Newman chooses when discussing pamphleteers, essayists, and public speakers. Newman writes that if blacks were refused the vote or could not effect change with their sparse votes, “they would nonetheless inject their views into the wider arena of debate over slavery and race,” presumably through the distribution of print media. Newman continues that “in doing so, black activists would demolish racial stereotypes” (183). I found the choice of the word “demolish” to be ill-advised. Though the actions of the activists would most likely challenge racial stereotypes, I think it is clear overstatement to claim that they were demolished. This implies that they were destroyed completely. Once again, Newman would be wise to choose his words more carefully to ensure that his framing of the arguments is fair and does not throw his authority into question.

By Sherwood

Okay, I’m coming clean. I hated the Jurgens Habermas reading from earlier this semester- the one that described the formation of a “public sphere.” It explained how print culture contributed to an environment in which private individuals felt comfortable identifying and discussing issues with society. Habermas’ prose was dense, confusing and overwhelmingly philosophical. For example, what is this supposed to mean: “when applied synchonically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, the fuse into a clouded amalgam.” Because of sentences like these, I found it pretty difficult to really pin down what Habermas really meant by the “public sphere.” However, in the context of this week’s reading, I feel much more confident about my understanding of the Habermas article.

In “Protest in Black and White,” Richard Newman describes black disenfranchisement in the United States during the antebellum period. Because “over 90 percent of American blacks resided in the slave South throughout the 1860s,” whites frequently deterred black voters from the polls and curtailed their right to vote (180). Paramilitary groups threatened to harm them or destroy their property, while state legislatures made voter registration more difficult by requiring literacy tests, charging poll taxes and establishing grandfather clauses, for example. Newmen also explains how simply by being black, these citizens were inevitably drawn into the “broader politics of race, civic participation, and nationhood” in their everyday lives (181). As free, voting, sometimes educated and sometimes wealthy blacks, they themselves were topics of controversy. Many whites were simply offended by the sight of them.

Here’s where things converge. So how did black Americans, as an ethnic minority, participate in a democracy that marginalized them so? To resist disenfranchisement and oppression more generally, black Americans gained a public voice by “seizing print” (181). Sound familiar? Newman’s narrative of black resistance is a great example of Habermas’ public sphere. The printing press, which Newman explains was essentially immutable, empowered black Americans and gave them a means of communicating ideas over both time and space.

They were able to express their political views openly despite being disenfranchised. It also allowed them to advance their position in society; in her blog post, Avery points out that “black leaders differentiated themselves as ‘elite’ so that they might mirror white structures of hierarchy. Because of Newman’s concrete example, I have a new appreciation for Habermas’ theory of the public sphere.