historying

In my gradual meander down the grad school application path, I am trying my best to ignore the glaring fact that I need to take the GRE’s. I have yet to register for them, although I occasionally go to the website and get outraged at the entire process which, in my view, is a complete scam. Just as occasionally, I will flip through the two year-old used GRE book I bought for five bucks, wonder what exactly a divisor is, sigh, and usually go make myself a sandwich. The key step, of course, is leaving the book open on the table at all times, so I can at least pretend that I’m preparing to take the test.

After four years of a liberal-arts education, such a multiple-choice standardized test appears like some distasteful and foreign apparition from my past. I disagree with the entire concept on a variety of levels. Although I realize schools want a consistent metric for evaluating “intelligence,” tests such as the GRE’s and SAT’s use the broadest possible brush to paint applicants. I can almost guarantee you that a student receiving a 1600 on the GRE is intelligent. I can similarly promise that someone receiving a 900 probably wouldn’t do well at Harvard. But looking at the difference between a 1300 and a 1500 for evaluating someone’s qualifications to attend your institution? It’s complete bogus. And while I realize that most grad schools (hopefully) use it as a an extremely general indicator, I just don’t see the point. Of course, the deeper problem is one of privilege and money: students and their parents spend hundreds of dollars on courses that teach them how to take these tests. This puts anyone else at a disadvantage, and works against any objective measurement of intelligence. It’s a broken system.

In the tradition of full disclosure, I openly admit that my GRE score will be the weakest part of my application. My “diagnostic test” was shockingly abysmal not only in the math section (which I was expecting, given the fact that I was a history major), but surprisingly low in the verbal section as well. All that’s left is for me to bomb the writing section. In conclusion, I am not objective, but I am curious: do the admissions boards for history PhD programs actually look at these scores? How much does it play into the decision?

In case it wasn’t obvious, I wrote this post in a procastinatory fit during another failed attempt at studying out of my trusty GRE prep book. Fortunately I remembered the key step of studying: I’ve left the book open on the table next to me. Okay polynomials, lets see what you’re made of…

Lisa Spiro has posted a great recap of her presentation “Doing Digital Scholarship” at the Digital Humanities 2008 conference. The presentation “focuses on a project to practice digital scholarship by relying on electronic resources, experimenting with tools for analyzing and organizing digital information, and representing ideas through multimedia.” All in all, I think the blog post is a wonderful introduction to digital scholarship, both as an overview and a jumping off point for further ideas. Spiro really displays that crucial trait necessary for a digital humanist: a seemingly unlimited willingness to try new approaches.

Errol Morris has yet another interesting post about interpreting photography and identifying fakes, inspired by the faked photographs of Iran’s missile launch several weeks ago. Also, if you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend his three-part series “Which Came First,” which details his attempt to uncover the truth behind Robert Fenton’s famous “Valley of the Shadow of Death” photograph of the infamous Light Brigade skirmish. What I liked most about it was his microscopic attention to detail and an open willingness to crowdsource, as over a thousand people responded and lent advice, tips, and clues. He even did a recap of these comments, which shows a real embrace of the power of collective intelligence and digital media.

GOOD Magazine has put up an extremely sleek and user-friendly interactive graphic titled “Wanderlust: GOOD traces the most famous trips in history.” Included among these are not only the standard fare of Lewis and Clark, Charles Lindbergh, and Marco Polo, but also fictional accounts such as Pequod from Moby Dick, along with Journey to the Center of the Earth. Although I will point out that it’s phenomenally Euro/American-centric, I do applaud its interface and design. This rivals some of the NYTimes’ recent gold standard information graphics as far as usability, style, and depth.

Finally, if you’d like to get worked up and indignant, read Edward Luttwak’s “A Truman for our times.” His thesis is almost comical: “While anti-terrorist operations have been successful here and there in a patchy way, and the fate of Afghanistan remains in doubt, the far more important ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush.” But what makes me downright irate is his complete hijacking of history. In a characterization that smacks of imperialism, ignorance, and borderline racism, he breezily describes eight hundred years of Chinese history in this pithy statement:

“That describes everything that the Chinese are not, and have never been. The Chinese empire was aggressive and expansionist under the Yuan dynasty and again under the Qing. But one dynasty was established by horseriding Mongols, the other by horseriding Manchus, both the products of foreign warrior cultures. The Han Chinese prefer other pursuits. Perhaps they will change, as cultures sometimes do.“

Historical determinism and unprofessionalism at its worst. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he then pulled a Lawrence of Arabia and ended with “A little people, a silly people – greedy, barbarous, and cruel.”

(This is the fourth installment of a multi-part post detailing my undergraduate thesis. See part one, part two, and part three.)

As I continued my research into Venture Smith’s life as a free man, GIS allowed me to construct a visual narrative of his forty years in Haddam, CT. After reconstructing each of his real-estate transactions, I was left with a surprisingly nuanced and revealing portrait of a free black man riding the tumultuous waves of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary New England. In this post I will present a selected sample of some of these recreated transactions, and briefly discuss what they reveal about Smith’s life and the broader world in which he lived.

By 1778, Smith had gone from the owner of a meager ten-acre parcel of low-quality land, to the proprietor of a sprawling 128 acres:

Venture Smith Property - 1778

The fifty year-old Smith faced the enviable prospect of having simply too much land to effectively use. Consequently, later that year he sold a twelve-acre tract to two free black men named Whacket and Peter:

Sale to Whacket and Peter - 1778

In effect, the modest real-estate transaction provided Smith with four additional laborers for his land (Whacket, Peter, and their two wives), while allowing him to recreate a semblance of black communal life in an overwhelmingly white town and region. On several occasions in his narrative, Smith mentions buying the freedom of slaves. In exchange, the men would work under Smith for a period of time. His sale of land to Whacket and Peter marks yet another instance of utilizing black labor, possibly in the tradition of “pawnship,” a West African practice described by Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson. The 1778 real-estate transaction offers a glimpse into both the economic and social motivations of a black man deftly maneuvering within a white world.

Another revealing transaction occurred in 1787, when Smith embarked on a joint business venture with a local man named William Ackley. Smith leased a small island in the nearby Salmon River to Ackley, and in the deed, spelled out with precise detail a contract for the two men to construct a fishing seine on the island. The enterprise was divided equally, with each man supplying half the labor and equipment, including lead, hair for ropes, twine for nets, a boat, and general repairs. In attempting to geographically locate this deed, I turned yet again to GIS. The deed spelled out its locations as “off of Beaver Point.” After finding a nineteenth-century map that labeled Beaver Point, I knew roughly where the island was. Unfortunately, the GIS datasets I had been using didn’t adequately portray the island. This time, I employed aerial photographs of the region in order to locate the island:

Lease to William Ackley - 1787

As is often the case, GIS offered up as many questions as answers: The island wasn’t entirely contiguous to his property, so how did Smith come to own its leasing rights? Was it a clause within a previous land deed, or was it an entirely separate transaction? I never found answers to these questions, and this investigative process provided me with the valuable (and frustrating) realization of the limits of historical inquiry. Instead, what the transaction did reveal was the phenomenally diverse activities of an independent property owner in the eighteenth-century. Beyond fishing in the river, Smith engaged in prolific woodcutting, tended an orchard, raised livestock, and engaged in trade throughout southern Connecticut and Long Island Sound.

Of course, as with almost any rural inhabitant with a large tract of land, Smith was a farmer. In order to investigate his agricultural pursuits (which both deeds and court files allude to), I looked for farming data I could use in GIS. Fortunately, the US Department of Agriculture created an extensive dataset of soil quality data for the state of Connecticut. I imported this data into GIS and overlaid it onto Smith’s property, creating a precise summary of Smith’s agricultural activity:

Soil Quality Data of Venture Smith's Property - 1790

I filtered the data to isolate only high-quality soil well-suited for farming. Two factors go into this characterization: the slope of the land, and content of the soil. Armed with this information, I found that Smith enjoyed a particularly rich area of farmland in the upper region of his property. I could personally attest to the suitability of this area, as I had walked through it several times:

The land lent Smith with several advantages. It was a short walk to both his homestead and the Salmon River, allowing for easy access, storage, and transportation of goods. In lieu of employing an official currency (which was famously wracked with inflation at the time), Smith, along with much of the rural populace, often utilized goods and produce as a means of exchange. His lucrative pasture provided him and his family with not only sustenance, but a means of obtaining goods with which to participate in the regional economy. As a black man and former slave, his land granted him with a critical foothold within the dominant economic framework of rural New England.

Without GIS, I never would have been able to effectively analyze the relationship between Venture Smith’s freedom and his property. Instead of making abstract conjectures based solely on written primary documents, I was able to add a visual and quantitative element to my investigation. Suddenly I could answer with precise and revealing detail the questions of where, what, how much, and to what degree. I could now recognize patterns, rebuild processes, and craft a visual construction of Smith’s land. With GIS at my fingertips, “ten acres of land” no longer a set of words on a yellowed property deed, but became a deeply nuanced story of where and what the land consisted of, how it reflected and revealed Venture Smith’s motivations and decisions as a free man, and finally his place within the wider world of late eighteenth-century rural New England.

(This is the third installment of a multi-part post detailing my undergraduate thesis. See part one, part two, and part four.)

When faced with the challenge of exploring the real-estate transactions and land holdings of Venture Smith, I ran up against the methodological barrier of analog technology. Reading the boundary descriptions were not enough. Neither was drawing them out by hand on a piece of paper. I needed the accuracy, fluidity, and versatility of a digital environment. This challenge led me down the path towards GIS, and I introduced myself to Beverly Chomiak, a geology professor at Connecticut College who kindly let me into her computer lab and showed me the basics of the software.

It was overwhelming at first, and the simple polygons I created in the beginning felt a lot like a student driver inching their way around an empty parking lot in a Porsche. I could literally feel the power of the software, as the computer’s hard drive frantically whirred and spun just to boot up the program. But what I was doing with it was almost comically simple. As I grew more comfortable with the interface, I began to explore, and soon hit that eureka moment of placing a series of puzzle pieces together: by creating polygons of neighboring parcels and overlaying them onto a basic map of the general area where I knew his property was located, I could place his first purchase in Haddam:

Once I had those pieces in place, I quickly learned it was a matter of finding data to add to the system. Next up was a hydrography layer, which gave phenomenally detailed information about various bodies of water across the state:

Specifically, this layer revealed something important: Venture Smith’s first purchase in the town, besides being small and narrow, had its eastern portion in a swampy marsh called Dibble’s Creek. Back at Pomona, I enlisted the generous help of Warren Roberts, GIS specialist at the Claremont Colleges’ library. He suggested I look into topography layers, and showed me how to obtain a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for the region online. DEMs allow the user to minutely examine the elevation and slope of the land, and the regional DEM for Haddam, CT turned out to be exceedingly well-detailed:

Like the hydrography layer, this additional information provided another insight into the quality of his land for that first 1775 purchase: it was incredibly hilly, especially in the eastern portion near the river. Warren also showed me how to create an elevation profile, as if one were walking from west to east across the narrow parcel:

The end conclusion was that this piece of land was not particularly valuable, especially for agriculture: marshy on one end, hilly in the middle, and with a steep bank on the other side. This evidence, supported by a clause within the deed itself, pointed towards Smith using this first parcel of real estate for two purposes: as a spatial placeholder within the town, and as a base of operations for his more lucrative pursuit: cutting timber.

Warren then taught me how to use the DEM data to render a beautiful, shaded effect. Using the elevation data, GIS can create an artificial light source and “raise up” the land to create shadows and highlights. After getting in touch with my artistic background and playing around with transparency, topo lines, and color schemes, I managed to create something that I thought looked pretty good:

While I had spent countless hours examining Smith’s land, both on a computer screen and through on-site exploration, I realized that anyone reading my thesis would have only their imaginations and my flat, two-dimensional maps with which to recreate his property holdings. Fortunately, the seemingly limitless toolkit of GIS allowed me build a 3-D tour of the land through the ever-handy DEM data:

Beyond creating pretty pictures of Smith’s first two property transactions that I could later use as a visual supplement, GIS allowed for in-depth historical analysis of Venture Smith’s real estate. Without this tool, I would have no idea what his first ten-acre purchase actually consisted of. Instead, I knew that it was poor land, and with this knowledge, the technology gave me a glimpse into the motivations and perspective of the middle-aged Smith during those first two years in Haddam. It allowed me to recreate his experience: cutting wood on the side of a hill, moving his timber down the steep embankment and onto the cart path mentioned in the deed, and stockpiling it for transport downriver to a town market center. Using GIS, I knew that these first years were more precarious than Smith let on in his narrative. He faced the daunting prospect of providing for a wife and children, one of whom was a newborn, moving to a new town as black outsiders, and settling onto a narrow strip of land with little to no value. All of this occurred against the backdrop of a quickly-erupting war between the colonies and Great Britain. Armed with the toolkit of GIS and peering through the lens of property and land, I was ready to construct my own narrative of Venture Smith’s life as a free man.

(This is the second installment of a multi-part post detailing my undergraduate thesis. See part one, part three, and part four.)

The need to specialize is a lesson that any undergraduate history major is forced to confront at some point in their studies. I learned this lesson early on in the summer after my sophomore year, when I came to understand the wide extent of the scholarly community who, like me, was studying Venture Smith. In order to find my specialty within this community, I turned to the most obvious starting place: his widely-read narrative.

The one aspect of Smith’s narrative that struck me again and again was his near-obsessive focus on money. Dictated at the age of sixty-nine, the elderly and ailing grandfather managed to recall the exact prices of financial transactions from three or four decades in the past. Scholars such as David Waldstreicher and Philip Gould have written articles about Smith’s sometimes-disturbing commodification of just about everything, including relationships with family members. As an example, on two separate occasions he mourns the death of a child not only with grief, but an exact recounting of how much money their deaths cost him. This narrative theme offers up room for fascinating historical inquiry – had Smith deeply internalized early American capitalist values? Was it a reflection of his childhood experience in Africa, when he witnessed his father tortured to death while refusing to tell his captors where he had hidden his money?

These questions, while interesting, had already been asked and discussed by scholars. Instead, Smith’s exacting financial memory offered up another opportunity. Included in these transactions were several scattered remarks concerning property purchases and sales. Some of these memories included not only a location, but the seller/buyer and sometimes the price as well. I quickly recognized this might be my opportunity for completing something original. So I drove to the town vault of Haddam, Connecticut, and immersed myself within their land records with the happy abandon of someone who was quickly discovering the addictive appeal of archival investigation. After some searching, I managed to find Smith’s first real-estate purchase in the town, when he bought 10 acres of land from a man named Abel Bingham for twenty pounds in the spring of 1775:

Abel Bingham Sale to Venture Smith

I have always known that I was a nerd. But nothing drove home that point more than when I let loose an involuntary and decidedly undignified fist-pump upon turning the page and seeing “Venture a free negro Resident in Haddam” written on the yellowed page. The thrill of discovery, the firecracker string of additional questions that immediately rose with each new piece of evidence – I was hooked. This is what I wanted to do.

Over the course of a week or two, I spent most of my days in the cramped quarters of the Haddam town hall vault, flipping over crackly pages underneath a horrible fluorescent light. I quickly decided to transcribe every deed I could find, which, while laborious, felt like the scholarly thing to do. And during this time, I learned the frustrations and rewards of working with 230 year-old documents. Deed indices, while occasionally helpful, were often incomplete or inaccurate. Venture Smith’s name could be spelled any way from “Venter” to “Vinter” to “Ventur,” and varying had either his surname or simple “negro,” “free negro,” or “a resident in Haddam.” And while transcribing was usually fine, there were several occasions when I labored over a string of words that I simply could not decipher.

As I typed all of these deeds (at the final tally, I found 29 land deeds that bear Smith’s name), I found myself wondering what exactly these pieces of property might look like. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to have a real-life idea, as I had been tagging along once a week with the archaeological team that was excavating his homestead:

In exchange for granting me access to the property (as I mentioned, it was on the site of a decommissioned nuclear power plant), I did my best to help out and learn the rudiments of archaeology. Of course I likely did more harm than good, as to my untrained eye, most pieces of pottery tended to look exactly like rocks to be tossed aside. Regardless, the experience made me wonder exactly which transactions referred to what parts of his property.

The land deeds used a metes-and-bounds system of measuring the parcels in question, whereby the description would start at one corner of the land’s boundaries, and follow the edges until it met back up at the point. The standard for measuring length were rods (1 rod = 16.5 feet), with direction given either in exact degrees (ex. “sixteen degrees north of south”), or with less precision (ex. “northerly along Abel Bingham’s land”). So one day I decided to sit down with a pencil, ruler, and protractor, and draw out these pieces of real estate. It was strangely therapeutic to become wrapped up in a quantitative exercise of units, conversions, and angles, after countless hours dealing with written words. Of course, my end result was far from ground-breaking:

After completing a few more of these drawings, I became frustrated. Not only was it time-consuming, but my attempts to put it onto a paper map largely failed – issues of transparency, scale, and unit conversion tripped me up repeatedly. But I was still obsessed with the problem: where were these pieces of property, and what did they look like? This frustration with the inadequacies of pencil and paper ultimately drove me into the arms of a digital technology that would widen my perspective on the possibilities of historical research: Geographic Information System (GIS).

(This is the first installment of a multi-part series detailing my undergraduate thesis. See part two, part three, and part four.)

It has been nearly three months since I graduated from college, and almost four months since I submitted the final draft of my senior thesis. I remember dropping off my three freshly-bound copies to the history department in a surprisingly anti-climactic ritual. In my sleep-deprived state, eyes bleary from hours of proofreading close to a hundred pages of my own writing, I experienced more weary relief than triumphant euphoria. Those pages represented the culmination of not only close to two years of work, but in many ways my collegiate career. Despite this, on that day my mind was too burnt out to clearly reflect on the process. Now, with a couple of months to clear my head, I’m ready to revisit the subject. I was always told that you should be able to summarize your thesis in thirty seconds to someone with no prior knowledge of it. This is a modified version of that summary, with a narrative slant on the story and process behind it, and with a special focus on its digital methodology.

The road to my thesis began my sophomore year (2006), when Pomona’s Hart Institute for American History generously gave me a summer research grant. My original proposal included the intention to examine prominent free black merchants in the New England shipping industry. Once at home in Connecticut, I sat down at my computer and had the crippling realization that I might be in over my head. In my grant proposal, I had confidently listed a wide variety of sources, libraries, and archives that I would use. Abstractly thinking about doing research proved much easier than facing the hard reality that I was a 19 year-old who had only a couple of months in order to produce some kind of original historical research that would justify the grant I had received.

This intimidating reality forced me to narrow my topic, so as simply to avoid getting overwhelmed by the challenge ahead of me. I focused my area to a single historical figure: Venture Smith. Smith was born in Africa around 1728 the son of a wealthy regional leader, was kidnapped by slave traders as a child, and sold to a Rhode Island merchant who named his new purchase “Venture.” He spent the next three decades in coastal New England, working under various owners until he managed to purchase his freedom in 1765. Over the next decade, he bought the freedom of his wife, children, and several other slaves and established himself as a prosperous businessman. In 1798, seven years before his death, he dictated an autobiography that survives as a vivid account of northern slavery.

Over the course of the summer, Venture Smith seemed to pop up everywhere I turned. On the very first day I began research, my local newspaper ran an article (the first of many to come) on him. Within the week, I had met the head of an archaeological team who was excavating his former property (which happened to be on the site of a nuclear power plant). Within a month I went on an informal walking tour of another piece of his  former property, led by a UConn professor studying Smith. On this tour I was introduced to John Sweet of UNC, leading national scholar of colonial race and identity and who also happened to be working on a possible biography of Smith. The third person of note on the tour was Connecticut’s state archaeologist, just for good measure. Later that summer I saw a regional museum exhibit which paired paintings with a series of poems composed by the state’s poet laureate, inspired and culled from Smith’s narrative. And the icing on the cake became a project to excavate Smith’s gravesite in an attempt to recover genetic material for DNA analysis. This caught international attention, and included a BBC film crew that ended up making a short documentary of the project. In short, Venture Smith became a historical celebrity.

In the midst of this three-ring circus of film crews, archaeological teams, and nationally-renowned history scholars, was little old me: a teenager with barely two years of college experience. As the full extent of Smith’s popularity as a subject for crowded academic study dawned on me, I became increasingly convinced of the impossibility of completing anything original. The entire experience proved to be a baptism of fire in the perils of doing research on an explosively popular subject. By the time I realized this challenge, I was at an awkward point of no return, as I had already invested too much time into the topic to change course. As such, I decided to take a two-pronged approach to the rest of the summer: collaborate and specialize.

First, instead of trying to engage in an intellectual turf war for the topic, I would embrace the monumental wave of interest and research going on around me. I forced myself to contact anyone and everyone even remotely connected to studying Venture Smith. Second, I needed to carve out a niche for myself, to do something unique and creative in my approach to studying Smith. It was this second realization, of the need for creativity and originality, that would eventually lead me onto the academic and intellectual path that I am still walking down to this day.

Great interactive graphic on the NYTimes that shows countries’ medal totals for each Olympics. You can use a slider on the top of the graphic to progress through time, and each country is represented by a varying sized circle, depending on how many medals it won that year. Not surprisingly, the United States and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) tend to dominate the one and two positions. What I found interesting was looking at each year and trying to figure out what was going on in the world and how that might have influenced the medal totals. The obvious example is 1980, when the US boycotted the Olympics. Also of note, Seoul in 1988 witnessed East Germany gain the second most medals at the games.

Finally, seeing the low number of medals going to the the southern hempisphere reminded me of the proportional maps at WorldMapper.org, which lends size to different countries based on the information it is displaying. I wish the folks at WorldMapper had some more historical data, so we could compare different factors (infant mortality, food production, etc.) with the NYTimes medal map. Also of note, the NYTimes map reinforces the problem with using proportional area/volume maps – specifically, humans are notoriously poor judges of area and volume, and particularly bad at judging the relative size of circles. A circle that has twice the area of another circle appears, to most people, as much smaller than it is. This leads to the necessity for scaling compensation with maps, as cartographers need to artificially increase the size of circles for humans to accurately estimate its relative size. John Krygier of Making Maps: DIY Cartography has a great post about the entire issue.

I’m glad to see the Map of Early Modern London is getting a fair amount of coverage. Spearheaded by Janelle Jenstad at the University of Victoria, the project “maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London. You will see many of the theatres and landmarks of Shakespeare’s time, and learn about the history and culture of the city in which he lived and worked.” In order to do so, they have created two interfaces of the Agas map of London. One is an old-school format of breaking the map into a basic grid with 32 boxes – clicking on one zooms in to that section and shows starred points of interest, such as taverns, theaters, etc. Hovering your mouse over the star gives you the name, and clicking on it takes you to more information about the location. This format is okay, but limited. For someone who has become completely accustomed to GoogleMaps, it is frustrating not having the quick and easy control of zooming in and out, panning, or finding information while remaining “in” the map.

They attempted to address this with an experimental map, which has a much more complex and interactive interface:

This really puts you in the driver’s seat in determining how you want it to appear, maneuvering through the map, and accessing its information. Jenstad designed the project as a pedagogical tool, and I think it would work really well for the classroom. It allows students to find information while also exploring the city and being able to observe geographical patterns or relationships. Interesting assignments could be looking for patterns in establishments, comparing and contrasting different wards and their contents, or designing a “walking tour” based on a theme of their choosing. I wish they would also make it possible to create a mash-up that incorporates present-day multimedia, such as clicking on a location and having a photograph or video appear.

The site does have its share of bugs and problems – broken links, buttons that disappear or don’t do anything, etc. Maneuvering within the map (even the experimental one) still feels kind of clunky. This is a general problem with interactive maps that aren’t based off an already-existing structure (such as GoogleMaps, ArcMap, etc.) Independently created maps can often seem amateur in comparison to standard, powerful formats we are used to utilizing. Nevertheless, I admire the project and the way it was carried out. It is immensely collaborative, with a long list of student contributors, and general guidelines for contributing information and plans to create an editorial board that will use a “refereeing process” of evaluation.