Sabrina's Digital Tools for Historians class blog

         For this week’s blog we were asked to do an environmental scan based on the research that we will be doing for the final project for this class. Two of the three of these are digital projects and the other uses graphs and other digital tools to support its research.   The research I will be doing for my final project will look at crime, punishment, and race in Seminole County, Florida, assisting my professor with his own research. This topic of research is also similar to my own research topic for my master’s thesis that is on crime, punishment, and race in Sanford, Florida, located in Seminole County.   The first of these digital projects is “Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia.”             It contains a word cloud, with links that will take you to an individual who was lynched and where this occurred.   You can also search the victims by decades and on a map of the state of Virg...

           This week we were directed to talk more about Dr. Ferster ’s book Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry specifically looking at the “ ASSERT Model ” as well as, further discuss out final projects for this class. Since I did not talk about the “ ASSERT Model ” in last weeks post I also believe it would be important to do so. The “ ASSERT Model ” according to Ferster was created to support creative visual projects to build on research (Ferster, 38-40). The first portion of the “ ASSERT Model ” which is shown in figure 1.29 on page 39 in the book is “ Ask a Question ” (Ferster, 39). Last week I mentioned what my research topic and historical questions are, so you may refer back to that blog post if you would like for reference which will tie into the first portion of the “ ASSERT Model ”. Like I mentioned previously, I am working in conjunction with and being advised by my professor, who is also the researcher. He has aided me in ident...

For this week, we were instructed to read a larger portion of Dr. Bill Ferster’s book Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry. This book looks at very interesting examples of different types of interactive visualizations. Ferster defines it as “…the reduction of raw information, such as data, into simpler graphical elements that use spatial variables, such as position, size, shape, and color, to reveal visual relationships and patterns implicit but hidden within the data” (Ferster, 5). The introduction looks at different tools and a multitude of ways to explore, map, and visualize data. Much of what we have seen until this point has been GIS related mapping tools, which is predominantly the examples we have seen thus far in the class, as well as few other things including text mining tools like Voyant. In his introduction, Ferster talks about how far information visualization has come throughout history. He talks about how interactive visualization falls, in a way, under t...