Hello all,
First, let me just put it out there that this is my first THATCamp, first unconference, and first post to this blog. I’m a PhD Candidate working on a diss that will hopefully have some awesome digital aspects. I’m looking at Baltimore merchants from about 1790-1830 and I want to do several things with my data. First, I’d like to map the relative locations of merchants in Baltimore (I have pretty specific info from city directories) over time. Second, I’d like to map their Atlantic networks, which will connect to Europe, the Caribbean, and South America. Third (and this one is only a small possibility) I’d like to map the flow of goods by volume, similar to these maps. What I’d like to achieve in this session is a set of ideas about which applications or methods would be best suited for what I want to do, and, to see if it’s realistic for me to tackle this much digital work for what will be a mostly traditional dissertation committee.
Help a grad student out! (that should be a category)
abby, this is similar to what i’ve been puzzling through in my own research for awhile now. see the two thatcamp sessions i proposed in the past: virginia2010.thatcamp.org/12/18/modeling-people-networks-for-historical-cultural-analysis/ and aha2012.thatcamp.org/01/03/visualizing-networks/. i’m afraid i’ve had the luxury of being a bit less practical about what i’m going to achieve and how quickly than the typical dissertator, so i may still be more full of questions than answers even now, but i’d love to be part of this session.
i think one of our biggest problems as historians trying to do this work is that we’d like to work with software that’s customized to our specific research findings and/or the unique interpretation we bring to it, but the products that are readily available have to fit a variety of needs and maybe aren’t customizable enough for us. that said, do try to attend the omeka and viewshare workshops on friday if you can, just to get an idea of what some of the current ready-to-go solutions are, and i hope we’ll be able to learn about some others at your session, or during the weekend, as well.
susan
@footnotesrising
Susan,
Thanks for the links to your other proposals – I saw that one of the commenters on the second post left a handy google doc full of useful info! You and I should definitely get a coffee together and brainstorm that distant-yet-looming panel we are on in the fall 🙂
Abby
@abschreiber
Abby, you might look at the Mapping the Republic of Letters project from Stanford as well for an idea of what would be possible given world enough and time.