Comments on: Illuminating historical networks

By: David Dwiggins

David Dwiggins — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:11:23 +0000

I’m also interested in this. I was thinking about it in terms of the work I did for my thesis where I basically rekeyed small chunks of Boston city directories for a 25 year period. I’d love to see some de facto standard for crowd sourcing this sort of thing so that the work I did could be rolled in with the work of others to create larger, more useful digitized sources. But there are a lot of hurdles to this sort of thing, starting with the fact that original data can be so ambiguous that different people may interpret the same thing in different ways. Coordination and data scrubbing can help, but these things take resources. So part of this is figuring out how the data can be structured, stored, organized, annotated and retrieved in ways that facilitate the creation of larger collections of networked information, and envisioning models for how work on this sort of crowdsourced historical information might be encouraged and funded.

By: Libby

Libby — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:45:30 +0000

I’m an historian who also works on social networks [particularly late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century modernists–literary and artistic–I’m interested in how friendship informs cultural production] and I’ve spent the past decade or so trying to link the networks of the folks at the center of my study [through correspondence, tracing obscure footnotes in other scholars’ works, looking at when and where these folks published in the same journals and had artworks in the same exhibitions]. My project [the book’s out in June] is also geographically specific, so I’d love to hear about how others are capturing and tracking similar data in their own work, and perhaps, how they are digitally visualizing their networks. I’m in!

By: Elisabeth Nevins

Elisabeth Nevins — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:48:24 +0000

This is very interesting to me and at the core of what we hope to do with the Old North’s Tories, Timid, or True Blue? website…the awesome version. Right now it’s a very rudimentary prototype but the big plan has always been to include lots more interaction between users of the program/archive to share and make connections between the documents–ideally in very visual ways. User generated connections as the whole idea is to let the users interpret of the various “historical dilemmas” presented on the site. The interpretation will evolve over real time, online in a very public way. We’ve mapped some of our plans out, but there are some many possibilities…

By: Sibyl Schaefer

Sibyl Schaefer — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:06:28 +0000

I’d be interested in participating in this session as well. I’m currently working on a Vermonters in the Civil War collection which brings together archival resources from around the state. It would be great to have some means not only capturing more contextual information about relationships between these soldiers, but also of how they may connect to other Civil War collections.

By: Patsy

Patsy — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:26:51 +0000

I think this would be a very valuable discussion despite the fact that limited resources may pre-empt implementations. My proposal for understanding better how to geo-reference images is a very tiny piece in the same spirit–an effort to discuss displaying geographical as well as historical networks in more complex ways.

I see this in addition to collection level access, not instead of it. Collections provide one of the many contexts we could be supplying users. Historical and geographical displays are two others.

Thanks for proposing this.
-Patsy

By: Lauren Klein

Lauren Klein — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:57:11 +0000

Hello, Kate! I’m interested in a lot of the same issues, and I hope that we can talk about them this weekend…

By: Edward Whitley

Edward Whitley — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 14:47:34 +0000

I’d be happy to participate in this session. My own research is on 19C New York writers, social networks, etc. Colin Wilder’s proposal for a session on “Network analysis” looks like a good dovetail with this one as well.