I decided to explore the Using Palladio to Visualize Ads project by Clare Jensen, Kaitlyn Sisk, and Aaron Barunstein. The goal of this project is to depict the geographical patterns of paths taken by runaway slaves in Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
The nodes of this project are the jailers’ notices which gave information for two locations useful for mapping: the county jail as well as the location of the slave owner. The edges are the pathways that the runaway slaves may have potentially taken between these locations.
The hypothesis of this project was that the pattern in Texas would look really different compared to that of Mississippi and Arkansas. Taking this into consideration, Mississippi data was used as a standard of normalcy to compare the differences of Arkansas and Texas. This is because Mississippi represented a typical slave holding state that wasn’t a borderland state like Texas. And Arkansas was different in the sense that it was a popular point of the route towards freedom for a lot of runaway slaves.
The project doesn’t allow many interactions with the graphs because of the lack of options in the Palladio resource. For example, an issue that they mentioned was that they weren’t able to embed the visualizations into a website, so instead they only took screenshots. I think that this hinders their engagement because if it was embedded into a website users would have been able to interact with it and move around the maps. This would have led to more information being taken from the graphs as well.
The project was created by first gathering the jailers’ notices from a county jail in each state. Then the location data was manually put into a spreadsheet. Then there was another spreadsheet used to contain the geographical coordinates for each location. The data was then uploaded to Palladio to create the “point to point” maps. The project combines network analysis with spatial analysis. This whole project was about using spatial analysis in order to further the network analyses of the different pathways. Using spatial analysis, they were able to geolocate and visualize the patterns in the routes of runaway slaves. This visual analysis gives room for more interpretation and research on why slaves from certain areas took certain routes and the impact of the different locations.
