Aidan Gabriel’s Site

My experiences this year have changed the way I think about doing many things, but the way I do history has probably changed the most profoundly. Initially, I did not think much of the digital format, especially doing digital history, however this course has shown me the way I will move forward doing history. I have only really thought of these digital tools I have learned in the scope of history and my readings however, so I wonder how I can apply the tools to different topics. Going forward, I would like to pursue the digital format in other areas and see how effective it can be else where.

My first portfolio activity was a necessary step to lay down the foundation of what I had learned during the course. Getting myself acquainted with primary resources and how to set up my own research inquiries was a tool I would need for the remainder of the course, and I think I did a fine job. In retrospect, my third portfolio activity, the website review on Nat Turner’s rebellion, was very similar to my first portfolio activity. It had catalogued primary resources, I had asked questions and found interesting information, and I analyzed that information to come to my own conclusions. However, this activity familiarized me with digital history concepts like metadata, and it make me think more about site functionality and aesthetics. I think what I learned doing this portfolio activity will help me the most out of all the activities that I did during this course. Computational text analysis, which was the concept in portfolio activity four, was probably the most interesting digital history concept in the course. Computational text analysis is an amazing tool for historians, it speeds up the research process and can generate questions and inquiries that can reveal fascinating conclusions. Even if computational text analysis can not retrieve true understanding from the text, I find it to be an invaluable tool that I would be excited to work with in the future. The geospatial work I did in portfolio activity six is definitely a more visual digital history tool than computational text analysis, and while I find it less compelling, I think it is a great tool to connect historians with others. The visuals combined with the narration of geospatial visualization creates a great way to get people interested while getting across key ideas. My narrative map of Fredrick Douglass from portfolio activity seven was a combination of the digital tools I had learned from many of the previous activities. Researching Fredrick Douglass, creating a geomap and widgets, and creating a aesthetically pleasing website were all processes that I could do due to my previous portfolios.

The portfolio activities refined and improved previous skills that I had already acquired. Many of the portfolio activities required research of primary resources. Prior to the course, the types of resources did not really cross my mind or seem that relevant, however I now see that the type of resource can change the quality of what you are creating. The portfolio activities also showed me the importance of diversifying your sources to strengthen your product. Another skill that the portfolio activities helped me improve on was annotating. Prior to the course, I was a lousy annotator and did not commit much time to the act. However, after doing the second portfolio activity I committed to annotating the rest of my readings and I saw some pretty good improvement. I have become more thoughtful and analytical in my annotating, and I definitely get more out of my annotations now than I had previously.

The course readings were just as important as the portfolio activities. It was the readings that really made the activities digital history. One of the readings that really made me think about history of slavery was the website that discussed the landscape of early Baltimore. The project really made me think about the complicated entanglements of slavery and how it reached every where in the city, down to the individual. The readings really brought meaning to the digital tools I used. While the statistics do not lie, the readings gave meaning to all the numbers and the activities.

I decided to revise and improve my second portfolio. I went through the metadata and filled in some missing entries and made sure that everything matched the sources. The annotations in my exhibit about my primary sources were missing so I made sure they were included.

I had always considered history to be studied straightforwardly with books and recordings, but this course has shown me a completely different approach, and a very deep and complex approach at that. While I will not be pursuing being a historian in the future, the kind of work I have done in this class has certainly piqued my interest, and I think I can use these tools in the future. Geomapping is especially an interesting tool that I can use to bring better quality to my future work. Learning to be more proficient with geospatial work, metadata, and maybe learning more about computational text analysis are all approaches I would consider in my future.

I chose to do a narrative map on Fredrick Douglass. Fredrick Douglass was a very interesting person and there is a lot to say about him. The open access primary resource identified Fredrick Douglass as the “most important black American leader of the 19th century.” I interpreted that as his contributions to the abolitionist movement making him the most important, so that is the significant element that I chose what to write about. Using the open access primary resource about Fredrick Douglass, I found about his various contributions to the abolitionist movement such as his autobiographies, newspapers, and influence during the civil war. I used StoryMapJS, which was fairly easy to use. I used the geomapping and media widgets to clarify and show examples of what I wrote about. I pulled some of my images from outside of the open access primary resource since I thought that those images would be represent the text. StoryMapJS provided many ways to spruce up my narrative map, so I changed some background colors and the font to make it a little more distinguishable and fun to read than the default preset.

Link to narrative map: https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/5d7e803d88e1b205519a1ab077dec839/fredrick-douglas/index.html

Geospatial visualization is an interesting way for digital historians to conduct inquiries beyond writing or creating visuals like maps. I think a lot of the ability for geospatial visualization to be so compelling lies in its relationship of absolute and representational space and narration. A good example of this can be found within Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore. The maps taken at face value may just seem to be illustrations, but they are actually visualizations of the messy, complex topography and life of Baltimore in the early 1800’s. The project specifically visualizes the life of African Americans during this time. To hone in on a specific map, the dot density map of early Baltimore reveals the absolute and representation space of the population of Baltimore. The map dots that are purple are white people, green for free blacks, and blue for enslaved workers. The map illustrates that, considering representational space, Baltimore has whites, free blacks, and enslaved workers all living in close proximity to each other. Considering absolute space, Baltimore is extremely dense with everybody working in close proximity and with not much physical segregation in the way of communities. However, the map does not show that racism and the slave trade was still a ever looming problem, and its effects were felt by free blacks as well. The trading of slaves was everywhere throughout Baltimore, so acknowledgement of it every day could not be avoided. This is a potential problem with maps, as they do not visualize life for people, they just merely give insights of the physical space. All the color and scale of the map do not illustrate the entire story. Maps often just are not expansive enough. However, Slave Streets, Free Streets visualizes Baltimore with maps and other illustrations by exploring how everything connects and pulling information from records to stitch things together. The result of this is a visualization of how life was for free African Americans and enslaved workers. The project combines narrative details of African Americans in Baltimore with the geospatial data of Baltimore to convey how life was for African Americans. This illustration makes it easier to understand the past and help tune our historical inquiries and questions. A reader can see the individual lives of people, where they live, and how they interact with the people and the city that they live in all in one illustrative piece. Geospatial visualization overcomes the pitfalls of maps and makes for a more cohesive and compelling way to learn than just reading a book. Geospatial visualization, combining narratives with physical, visual data, makes forming historical inquiries and questions easier than it would be if they were separate. Finetuning geospatial visualization with other computational tools like computational text analysis could make it even more interesting and easier to use and learn from. Overall, geospatial visualization is a useful tool in better understanding the past and building historical inquiries and questions due to its effective illustration of the interconnectedness of physical space and narration.

I find that computational text analysis has great research value to me, and that it would be of definite use to me as an historian. To begin, computational text analysis can help stimulate inquiry questions. Computational text analysis is “distant reading” and therefore can be used to analyze a large group of documents at once. To use the example of “Mining the Dispatch”, the input for the text analysis was a collection of over 100,000 documents. Since computers can do millions of calculations easy, you can use a extremely large sampling size instead of being limited to analyzing as much as you could physically do yourself. In “Mining the Dispatch”, computational text analysis was used to do topic modeling. For the input of the text analysis, it used over 100,000 documents to categorize them each by topics. One could apply computation text analysis like it was used in “Mining the Dispatch” to generate a list of topics to create some inquiries about a group of documents. However, a potential problem with that and computational text analysis in general is that it will not be 100% accurate. Using the example “Mining the Dispatch” once again, graphs are given that display the frequency of a certain topic that were generated by computational text analysis, and then are compared to the true value. While they are often very accurate, there are some abnormalities in fugitive slave ads graph that show that there are inaccuracies that should be taken count of. The reason for this is because computational text analysis is “distant reading” and not “close reading”. Close reading is when a person combs through the text to truly discern the texts purpose, tone, settings, etc. This is different from distant reading, as a computer is unable to read like a human as it cannot understand what it is reading. Instead, a computer has to view the words individually as tokens. It can then group of individual words as tokens or take them individually to determine how much of a word shows up in a text, or what word is most likely to show up next to another word. This is how the topic modeling in “Mining the Dispatch” was done. While distant reading has it’s uses, true understanding of text will come from close reading, so that is where I would draw the line on the use of computation text analysis. Still, using computational text analysis as the first step in an approach to historical research is a great way to start. For example, I could use computational text analysis in a large electronic library to find key words and phrases that would be relevant to my research question. This would point me in the right direction to a group of documents that might be the evidence I could use. Then, I could do a close reading of the documents to have an deeper understanding, contextualize, and then corroborate between the documents. Using computational text analysis in this way speeds up the initial research process so I can spend more time analyzing documents.

This is a website review on Revisiting Rebellion: Nat Turner in the American Imagination (American Antiquarian Society) (https://americanantiquarian.org/NatTurner/). This website is all about the man Nat Turner, a enslaved man who led a rebellion that attacked multiple plantations in August of 1831. Specifically, this website is about exhibiting the many portrayals of Nat Turner in various media from the 1800’s and 1900’s. Revisiting Rebellion collects these portrayals and gives context and explanation for each. The scholarship within the exhibits is sound and current. The front page of the website clearly defines it’s purpose and lays out it’s structure. On the side of the front page you can easily find links to the various portrayals and reports on Nat Turner. All the exhibits function properly and are effective in transmitting information. Something worthy of note is that the website is powered by Omeka. This website is a great example for how to format a website on Omeka for students in this course. The items have complete metadata, quality images, and tags. However, since the website has an Omeka layout it isn’t necessarily original, but it makes good use of the digital format. There were no problems with connectivity and the website was accessible and still easy to navigate on a phone. The website has a focus primarily for scholars or those who have a deep interest in Nat Turner. The website delivers on the needs of the audience. I can envision everything on the website fitting well into a print medium, so I don’t think it does anything that a book couldn’t do, but the ease of access of the website is noteworthy. The exhibits featured in the website were all provided by the American Antiquarian Society and The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and there were multiple curators. There is a works cited and consulted page that can be easily accessed from the front page.

Item creation and description of my two primary sources did not have many hiccups. My two items were images, so I had almost no text to analyze. One of my sources, “Leap of the Fugitive Slave,” was unclear on what the fugitive enslaved woman was jumping off and what she was jumping into. Since it was a jump towards certain death, I concluded that she was jumping off a bridge into a body of water. Other than this small detail, the process of creating a description was simple. My other item, “Effects of Fugitive Slave Law,” had quotes from the Bible and the Declaration of Independence that added some intrigue to the source, so I chose to use it for my item. Annotating sources for a public audience definitely made me think a bit more about how I should be annotating. I think it made me more thoughtful and more analytical regarding my annotating. I feel that I got a lot more out of my annotations than I normally would, so I think I will try to capture the mindset I had during annotating and try to apply that to all of my annotations from now on. The items and exhibits that I have seem from my classmates have been interesting to read.

As I was reading Unrequited Toil, a particular sentence caught my attention. “In Slave Societies, owners and managers intensified violence to boost productivity, mitigate rebelliousness, and prevent uprisings.” I had always understood slavery to be a particularly ruthless experience, so I was not surprised when reading this. However, reading it gave me the idea: Are there any examples of peaceful or non-violent slave owners? If so, how successful were they? So, to find the answer to these questions, I went to websites such as docsouth.unc.edu and dp.la to find primary sources. I was able to find a primary source that made me reframe my question. That particular source I found was The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/prince/prince.html). The readings describe Mary Prince, a slave owned by Captain Williams. Mary spent most of her time under the care of his wife Mrs. Williams. The time Mary spent under Mrs. Williams was the happiest she had been. She had also been given tasks such as babysitting. The sources made me reconsider the notions I had coming into this process and as a result I restructured my questions. I discovered that being enslaved did not always mean one would do hard labor like tending to fields, but could also consist of doing housework, babysitting, or being a friend to the slave master’s daughter. This expanded my understanding on slavery. One did not have to own a slave for purely economic gain like farming a cash crop. Also, in the case of Mary Prince, slaves could be happy being under a master, like Mrs. Williams, who was kind and peaceful. So, I restructured my questions around those new discoveries. To answer my questions, there are definitely examples of peaceful or non-violent slave owners. Adjusting for my redefinition of success, I would say that these slave owners were successful. I didn’t really feel the need to access materials that were non-digitalized.