#1. Research Mapping
While this part of the project has been the most informal, here are some of the things I've done while thinking about this project:
- Visited Archives
- Identified Potential Source Material
- Started Building a Dataset of People & Places
- Collected Images of these People & Places
- Experimented with some Data Visualization in the Family Tree project and Neatline Exhibit.
The point of this "Research Mapping" was to identify what information I did know, and where the holes were in my investigation. I have been quite surprised to discover how little information I knew about the basic people/places, and how difficult it has been to track down bits of historical facts in various sources. Laying the groundwork for these bits of information has been tedious and not particularly illuminating, but hopefully will come in useful for my project in the long run. Determining software programs and storage systems, formatting databases and collecting images has set the stage for many more bits of data to follow, no matter if I attempt a larger scale data scraping / mining project, or just keep plugging in little bits as I find them.
While I don't feel that any particular element of this project has given me a finished-looking "publishable" product, I have addressed all of my Project Goals, have been introduced to many new skills and software capabilities, and have ideas of where I might continue this sort of research visualization in future areas.