Blog Post #4: Network Analysis (Victoria Bradjan)

The project that I explored for this week’s blog post is “Using Palladio to Visualize Ads.” Palladio is a digital tool developed by Stanford University to visualize geographical and historical data. The project responds to the limited knowledge that runaway slave advertisements held in tracking these individuals’ actual paths. It seeks to supplement our modern knowledge of these paths by using Palladio to connect runaway slaves’ starting spots with the points where they were captured.

How was the project created?

The researchers utilized three different sample sets of jailers’ notices—chosen because of their clear documentation of slaves’ start and end points during their journeys—to combine into a spreadsheet. The first set contained two notices from each state. The second included all notices from the Bexar (TX), Pulaski (AR), and Jefferson (MS) county jails in the late 1850s. The third involved all available jailers’ notices between 1840 and 1842. The researchers recorded start and end locations (including geographic coordinates) for each runaway slave, and then connected the individual routes in Palladio to visualize and compare maps between different states.

What interactions does the project allow? How does this impact their effectiveness and/or your engagement?

The project page provides non-interactive images, but they each include the entire sprawl of each state. Only one of these images provides a special Palladio analytical feature—in this case the “Count By” option which functions like a heat map in visualizing the frequency of individual locations. The project also acknowledges that they weren’t able to depict arrows to indicate the directions of these individual paths.

The project analyzes that there is no distinctive pattern of routes in the data from Mississippi and Arkansas, but the routes in Texas all head clearly southwest. The researchers proceed to explore potential historical reasoning for these trends, but ultimately state that such a project would benefit from a more advanced visualization program.