By Eleanor<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

I think something really important to add to Freedom on the Move is an improved search functionality. As it is, you can only search by the name of the newspaper that the ad was published in, by the state it was published in, or by optional user-inputted tags. If I wanted to look at all the ads searching for runaway female slaves, for example, the only way I could do that would be by searching the tags for \u201cwoman\u201d, \u201cfemale\u201d, \u201cfemale slave\u201d, and any other descriptions of the topic that I could think of. Even then, I would only get the advertisements that had been tagged during the first transcription step as featuring women. Tagging is completely optional and there is no standardized vocabulary, so it is currently very difficult to search the database for ads relevant to specific topics. That makes this database a less-than-ideal source for historians trying to gather primary source data to answer research questions.<\/p>\n

I agree with Alec<\/a> that implementing more drop-down menus or other multiple-choice options could streamline the description process. That could also help with the searching issue. For example, the gender of the slave is not a free-entry text field; it is marked by the user by filling in the \u201cMale\u201d bubble, the \u201cFemale\u201d bubble, or neither. This means that somewhere in the data collection, every ad that has been processed and contains a male slave should have the category \u201cMale\u201d attached to it and every ad that contains a female slave has the category \u201cFemale\u201d. This is a much better starting point to be at than if gender had been a free input field \u2013 then we would probably have some combination of \u201cwoman\u201d, \u201cfemale\u201d, \u201cF\u201d, \u201cgirl\u201d, etc. describing the female slaves instead of one uniform descriptor. This standardized categorization makes it significantly easier from a programming standpoint to go in and make the processed ads filterable by the gender of the slave. Taking this multiple choice approach with as many data fields as possible will not only quicken and clarify the data entry process, but will also make improving the searchability of the database much easier to do.<\/p>\n

Also, I had a similar experience to Kurt<\/a> with being repeatedly signed out of the site, which was irritating. Some times when I tried to visit it, I would be consistently kicked out as soon as I had signed in and was forced to just come back later in the day and try again.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Eleanor I think something really important to add to Freedom on the Move is an improved search functionality. As it is, you can only search by the name of the newspaper that the ad was published in, by the state it was published in, or by optional user-inputted tags. If I wanted to look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}