Aside from the Feltron Reports last week which I couldn’t access and Lawrence Lessig’s piece which proved to be similarly unavailable, I found the various readings to be intriguing examples of current digital resources or tools that can aid us in the creation of our own digital scholarship. Unfortunately, many of these works seem to suffer from a lack of either easy academic applicability or effective user interface, which appears to complicate their actual use. Making wordles or scatterplots is fun, but aside from their visual appeal it is difficult to see their use in a professional academic publication; the data is presented in an interesting way, but one which can be difficult to extrapolate or precisely quantify. On the other hand, sites like HistoryWired contain a great deal of useful information, but all too often present that information in a confusing or inconsistent manner; the artifacts shown on this particular Smithsonian site are difficult to locate, and their organizational criteria is unclear (gunboat in Transportation, not Military section, etc.). Avoiding these sorts of pitfalls in producing our digital works is essential, as a poor interface or a pretty-but-vague sorting tool can all too easily render an otherwise exceptional research project effectively worthless.
At the moment, I’m working on basing my final project on genealogical data gathered by my family over the course of many years. Currently, the list of ancestors and relatives runs upwards of eleven thousand names, and digital sorting and research tools could provide some very useful results. While I’m still working out how to transfer the data from a specialized genealogical format to one which could be entered into digital search programs, I’m thinking of producing a map (or maps) showing the progression of places of birth or death from individual to individual over time. Places of birth for relatives born in each time period (perhaps 20-25 years per) would be represented by different colored dots, which when viewed in sequence would show a sort of migration pattern within my family. It would be interesting to see whether the geographical dispersal of my family narrowed down consistently, or went through periods of significant displacement or even expansion; the changes noted between European-born and American-born ancestor patterns could also be useful. As always, I appreciate any and all comments or suggestions.
I’m having a hard time understanding how that would fall within the realm of digital scholarship. Wouldn’t you essentially be making a database of existing “analog” materials, or is your genealogy already online? I think it would be different if you were, say, pulling that information from ancestry.com. Can you explain a bit more the element of existing digital sources that you’ll be incorporating?
It’s already in a digital format, albeit one which would have to be altered somewhat to fit the mapping programs. Due to repeated reliability issues we’ve experienced with ‘professional’ sites like ancestry.com, all the data has been independently gathered and verified.
Wow! That project sounds cool. I like the mapping idea. In what format is your database of 11,000 plus names? I think organizing or “prepping” that data would be the hardest part and nearly impossible if it’s not already in usable form. I work daily with the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress (http://bioguide.congress.gov/), a behemith XML database of … you guessed it: 11,000 plus entries.
11,000 is a lot of relatives. Could you perhaps work with a smaller data pool, to make it more manageable to start with? Maybe look at just the first generation arrivals to the United States?
At the moment, I’m only dealing with direct ancestors who were born or died in the United States, which narrows down the list to slightly under a thousand names.
I recommend matching up the migration patterns you find with historical events. Otherwise I fear they would seem isolated and difficult to understand. I assume there are moments of significant shifts; you should be able to account for those shifts.