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

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 \u201cReading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs\u201d 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, \u201cis that a medium-sized data set like Maury’s 19th century logs (with \u2018merely’ millions of points) lets us think through in microcosm the general problems of reading historical data.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/b>, 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 \u2013 isn’t the \u201cso what?\u201d question, the participation in the discussion of live question, what makes history a worthwhile subject?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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 […]<\/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-1424","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\/1424","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=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}