Seeing Anew: Humanities Data Revisual-ization

Benjamin MacDonald Schmidt Assistant Professor of History, Northeastern University Core Faculty, NuLab for Texts, Maps, and Networks

January 3, 2015

Data Re-visualization

Deck 701: American Shipping, 1800-1850

Deck 720:German weather data

Deck 735:Soviet weather data

Historical Data Revisualization: The Frontier

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.

1790

1800

1810

1820

1830

1840

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

Why revisualize?

1880

1890

1900

Georeferencing and training

Census frontiers (red) vs county boundaries

Replacing the 1890 census

National Museum of the American Indian, 2014

Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 1916

The problem of Interactivity