The network analysis project I chose to focus on was Clare Jensen, Kaitlyn Sisk, and Aaron Braunstein’s effort to visualize runaway slave advertisements using Palladio, a digital tool that creates geographic networks. Each node on the map represents a location, drawn from jailers’ notices. This location is either an enslaved person’s place of origin (where they escaped from) or the county jail where they were caught. Each edge represents one person’s path between the locations as they attempted to achieve self-emancipation. Each node is sized based on count, meaning the frequency with which it appears in the record. To better serve the authors’ purposes, the maps are divided based on state, meaning that there are three different maps using the same technique: one for Texas data, one for Mississippi data, and one for Arkansas data.
Palladio is not an interactive tool, and cannot be embedded in external sites. As such, users can only see screenshots of the maps, and are unable to use interactive measures like hovering or clicking to reveal more information about the nodes. While clear patterns of movement can still be seen – it is obvious, for instance, which nodes are the county jails, as that is where the edges converge – this lack of interactivity removes a level of detail from the project and makes it difficult to examine the information up-close. The authors also note that they were unable to impose state lines on the maps, which limits the geographic context available to users. This information, along with labels for the different points, would be useful in analyzing movement patterns in relation to borders and population hubs.
Within the map itself, the creation of networks using geographic information is the only type of analysis used by the project’s creators. However, they also link out to pages using text analysis, topic modeling, and code to determine locations, all based on the same original data set. These additional research approaches add depth to the analysis, showing not only the networks created by fugitive slave movement but also different words that are most prevalent in the runaway advertisements as well as popular topics in the documents. Overall, while “Using Palladio to Visualize Ads” has some weaknesses in its lack of interactivity, which stem from the tool used, it remains a useful network for analyzing paths of escape and capture for enslaved individuals.
