Network Analysis Blog Post 4 (Max Votruba)

For this weeks blog post I decided to focus on the Homesteading the Plains project run by the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This project aims to provide a solid base for scholarly information on homesteading in the United States during the late 19th century. I chose to do this project for this blog because I thought the intent of the project was very interesting. Homesteading is not a part of American history I had ever really thought about or even knew much about. I love when historians create really cool projects for really niche subjects that one would not assume anyone cared about.

The nodes for this project are the people of the Great Plains who are represented in the networks. The people are homesteaders and witnesses. The edges in the project represent the socio-legal relationship built off the practice of witnessing. In the days of homesteading, homesteaders needed to have two witnesses willing to sign a document of ownership in order to own their land, hence the term ‘witnesses.’

The interactions this project allows for are pretty interesting. The website separates the data into three different networks which then divide down into networks for different towns in different counties. The three network subcategories are Leadership, Community, and Geography. The Leadership network highlights key figures in the homesteading communities. The Community network shows the close-knit communities formed among the homesteading communities. The Geography network shows that many homesteaders imagined themselves to live in sort of rural neighborhoods. The networks under this subcategory show these geographical relationships.

Once you get into one of the networks, you can click on any dot. In all of the networks, the interconnected dots represent people; however, the relationships the dots represent in the different subcategories show different information. When you click on a dot, you get information about the person’s physical location and their relations to other dots (people) in the network. While this is all cool and fun, I wish the website would do a better job of explaining exactly what all the information presented meant. The network will tell you the in-degree and out-degree of every person, but I’m not too sure what that means.