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

In his blog post \u201cReading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs,\u201d historian Ben Schmidt struggles with something of an existential question, regarding how to conduct historical analysis in the 21st century. He argues that the interpretive work of history remains relevant, but admits that the data historians have previously worked with has been digitized. However, although this shift towards a new medium demands historians change up their traditional methodology, Schmidt seems excited about the future of the field. He concludes that neither \u201chumanistic competency or technical expertise from the sciences\u201d are adequate for \u201chumanistic readings of digital data.\u201d<\/p>\n

To corroborate his argument, Schmidt offers an example.<\/p>\n

Consider the \u201cmillions of points\u201d in a \u201cmedium-sized data set like Maury’s 19th century [ship] logs.\u201d Schmidt’s goal is simply to interpret large sets of data at once, like this one, which he calls \u2018reading’ them. He suggests that major trends become immediately apparent when data is represented visually. Digital tools make data visualization possible and easy.<\/p>\n

He introduces a pair of maps that also serve as dynamic representations of early American shipping and the global whaling industry, respectively. Colored dots, representing ships, travel to and from major ports around the world. The most popular routes are dense with traffic, leading between England and the American seaboard, around the cape of Africa and below South America. During the summer months, the northern Pacific becomes flush with color, but in the winter, these ships migrate south. This phenomenon was similar to what Cordelia observed<\/a> in her map, when \u201cthe California Gold Rush [was] suddenly visible, as [was] the great Mormon migration to Utah.\u201d The true purpose of Schmidt’s maps, like the ones Cordelia analyzed, was \u201cthe ability to view historical events as they happened.\u201d Also, Hawaii and the Galapagos were apparently popular pit stops.<\/p>\n

Schmidt argues that this example, which makes apparent a wealth of information after only a few seconds, demonstrates strength of visualizations over other methods of understanding data.<\/p>\n

Earlier on, I called these both maps and \u201cdynamic representations.\u201d However, if one considers the principal purpose of maps, which is to convey geographical information, they are more the latter than the former. The main focus of these tools is the data \u2013 patterns of ship routes around the world \u2013 not the geography.<\/p>\n

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

By Sherwood In his blog post \u201cReading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs,\u201d historian Ben Schmidt struggles with something of an existential question, regarding how to conduct historical analysis in the 21st century. He argues that the interpretive work of history remains relevant, but admits that the data historians have previously worked with […]<\/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-1434","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\/1434","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=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}