Blog 4

I chose to look at the network analysis project ‘Using Palladio to Visualize Ads’ by Clare Jensen, Kaitlyn Sisk, and Aaron Braunstein. In their project, they used Palladio to link the locations of jails where slaves had been captured and held while trying to flee to the locations they were escaping from. They got this information from jailers’ notices of county jails in Bexar, Texas, Pulaski, Arkansaw, and Jefferson, Mississippi. Their goal was to look for patterns in routes taken by slaves when seeking freedom. They took the locations from the notices and then input the data manually into a spreadsheet before uplading that data to Palladio. To visualize they then laid the network on a map. The nodes are locations and the edges connect the location of the jail to the location of origin. The edges don’t actually show the path taken, rather it draws a direct line from the origin to the jail.

There are no interactions on the project. The tool they used also doesn’t allow for them to embed images online, so the images on the page are screenshots. There is no zooming in or out, outlines of states, or direction indication. These are all things the team has already flagged as shortcomings that they wished the tool allowed for. I agree that these additions would increase understanding and readability.

I, personally, found it confusing when they wrote

As shown above, jailers’ notices between 1840 and 1842 follow no discernible pattern, and the maps are difficult to interpret. The maps could potentially be made more readable through the addition of arrows in order to indicate the direction taken, but currently Palladio does not have this capability.

The maps created from the data for individual county jails, however, proved much more informative. By juxtaposing maps of start and end points from Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas jailers’ notices, we observed striking differences in the patterns of runaway paths across states.

It is difficult for me to fully understand how the two data sets mentioned differ. Are the maps between 1840 and 1842 for all county jails in the state or are the maps for individual county jails of a larger time range or is it both or something else? I assume the time range is the same but one has all county jails as opposed to focusing on one county, but I feel the writing could have been more clear.