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.