Visualize History

I’ve always said that there is nothing like a shower, a shave and a good night’s rest.  Any of those three is great, and I’ve had all three in the last 12 hours.  Pretty impressive, I know.

As a result, I am ready to face the project again, with my inspiration renewed.  I’ve been working on my sources, which, like everything else, you can find on the wiki.  I’m trying to focus my search on data that fits my project.  Here’s an outline of the data I’m thinking about right now.

The Valley of the Shadow is an exhibit produced by the University of Virginia that looks at two nearby towns, one in Virginia (and therefore the Confederacy) and one in Pennsylvania (and therefore in the Union).  It tracks events from the perspective of each side, and gets into a fair bit of detail for that very specific region.

Civil War Timeline is a general timeline of the war from TheHistoryPlace.com that covers general facts like battles, truces, and governmental actions.  It would be difficult to present the Civil War without "The Facts" from a place like this.

American Presidents is a dataset prepared through the Simile Project at MIT and provides detailed information on the 43 Presidents of the United States, including religious and affiliations, birth and death times and places, and term lengths.  It is always helpful to keep in mind who was running the country during these big events.

The last source I’m seriously considering is the U.S. Census, which provides a whole mess of historical data.  My advisor first suggested it to me, and now I’ve had a chance to look at the data a little bit.  I’m not sure it exactly fits my model, and it seems to me more like a GIS dataset.  I can’t imagine how I would display percentages and especially changing percentages in my current setup.

So that’s the plan.  I’ll start working on it today, probably, and I’m sure that list will get updated a lot.

Prepare to come about.  Ready about.  Hard a-lee.

I met with my advisor today and she and I had one of the most productive meetings of the project so far.  Now that was probably because I was so lost (in stays if we’re sticking with the metaphor) yesterday that I wrote down a long list of items in two columns and said “pick one”.  She did, and we talked about where the project is and where it should be.

The Good News: Where the project is

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’ve made great progress recently.  I’ve added external data with examples, completely revamped the object model and in general made everything better.  You can see the Presidents lined up by their hometowns and at the same time see which states existed when.  You can view the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s kml file of the concentration camps, seeing all the data that the Museum added.  It is nice to be able see that in action.

The Bad News: Where the project is going

As you recall, my goal in this project is to solve this problem of visualizing historical data in the abstract.  Having decided that one or several sources of data would be necessary to achieve such a goal, my advisor and I sought out such sites.  But alas, none were found.  What to do?

Ok I’m done talking like that.  We decided it would be best to find one area and one time period and digitize many sources for that time period.  The time period I’ve chosen is 1850-1890 (you: “Wow this guy really likes the Civil War”).  I hope to look at a number of sources and find a nice way to parse them all without having to store them all.  Right now I’ll start with historical census data and a few others sites that I’ve found and we’ll see where that takes me.

So I’m a little bummed that I seem to have failed in this particular piece of the project.  I’m glad to have a well-defined goal again but I was really hoping I could do it all.  I suppose this is why software companies exist.

I’ve finally started to get some content up on the site and I have to say it’s a great feeling. I’ve always been able to picture what the site should look like, and while it’s not even close, I’m pretty amazed at how cool it is to see it coming together.

Now I’m sure this is frustrating for you, since, as you know, you cannot see the site coming together. Still, you should take my word for.

If you don’t, let me tell you that I’ve added two types of data: data uploaded by hand, and, more importantly, third-party kml files. As some of you surely know, kml is the file type for Google Earth. Part of the new specification allows for dates to be associated with places, and is that way kml can be converted to historical data fairly easily in concept. For example:

• These United States: http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/us_states.kml
• Concentration Camps: http://www.ushmm.org/googleearth/camps.kml
• Law and Order: CSI: http://myweb.students.wwu.edu/~kennym2/EGEO_451/lab1/locations_3.kml

Those files and many others can now be display in Visualize History, with the Time Slider, polygons, blurbs, mouse effects, links and more. They are all hosted on someone else’s site, relieving Visualize History from the burden of storing and updating the historical data.

A lot of work needs to be done before I will open up the site, but it is nice to make quantifiable progress.