Completion

It's finished!

My project is finally completed and ready to launch! It's certainly a learning process, but it does highlight areas of my research that I wanted to focus on. It also allowed me the opportunity to play with digital tools, with some successes and some failures. This allowed me to analyze data a bit differently than I would have if I had just written a traditional paper.

So here it is! I'm more relieved than anything to have something that I knew nothing about completed in only a semester. Here's to more digital humanities and the continuation of collaboration in digital history!

Earapoza.iweb.bsu.edu/MaritalBliss/MainPage.html

Damage Control Night and an Update

Alrighty, so this week has been a bit crazy.

Right now, I am in the process of simplifying my content essays (the ones written for my 650 about marriage in the North and the South), troubleshooting my code and fixing the errors within it and getting my mapping data finalized. I just got all 28,221 entered in on Massachusetts marriages on excel with their corresponding towns. I am still looking to get all the Virginia marriage data entered and then forward then to Angie who can help me map these layers.

I have selected my sources for the etiquette examples of literature and then I just need to pull out excerpts. I will also be doing a word cloud of these books to show the commonality of words and this section will also show the nGram for booking written in the period around 1850 (+/- 5 years).

Right now my maps are almost done, my nGram is completed, my images need to be narrowed down (census records and images of married couples), and my newspaper excerpts need to be narrowed down and presented in a more readable fashion (potentially OCR them and add Voyant). I would also like to complete a timeline of popular U.S. history events and the publication of major books/articles on marriage.

I'm not super stressed about getting all this done, once I troubleshoot a few errors on my website, I will be able to just plug in my content that has all been gathered and then upload it.

Update Time!

The semester is certainly chugging right along! I will apologize for the delay in this blog-it was written over a week ago, but I forgot about the whole "publish this post" button that demands to be pushed in order to post. Frustrating to say the least.

Regardless, I haven't had a lot of time to spend on the website portion of my project, but rather have been compiling snippets of primary sources and organizing my research in order to have it formatted better for the website. I have also been working on duplicating my project for another class which is proving to be a bit difficult seeing that the content of the two projects is fundamentally different.

Right now, I plan on delving into my primary sources a bit more, linking and adding them to the website, recomposing my historiography in a way that is user-friendly and then starting to draw conclusions from the spatial and digital representation of my research! The end is indeed in sight!

I'm hoping to have all my coding and connections done soon so that they will be out of the way, but I am stil toying with how to represent my data, as well as fighting ArcGIS a bit on the creation of my maps. I may need to go back to Angie and see if she can help me structure them in a more readable way. All in all, it's getting there and it should be decently easy to wrap it up for finals!

Web Designing

OH MY GOSH I HAVE A SITE.

I apologize for the outburst, but it is really exciting to finally have a template up and functioning with links between pages and content online! It's really pretty exciting to visually upload the data and see what the end result will look like. I finally feel like I have a handle on this and know what I'm doing.

I now have a new organized site map that corresponds with what tabs are in my research/website and am now playing with how I want to organize this. Onward and upward!

Update #2

After giving a Pecha Kucha presentation (see below!) I've come to realize some things that I want to update about the scope and presentation of my project.

First, rather than looking at the entirety of the U.S. in the 1850's I am going to look at just at Massachusetts and Virginia to limit the number of sources as well as to provide specific examples of just the north and the south. That means that all my primary sources need to come out of those two areas. Though I would have liked this project to encompass more, it seems to make more sense to limit the project to two specific areas indicative of their regional areas.

That being said, it makes my primary and sample sources smaller and more attainable. So I am feeling much better about mapping out these two specific areas (by county) and then looking at just the articles and books published in these areas. This makes the project more powerful and gives more of a reasonable look at what marriage was in the 1850s between the north and the south.

I have started reading some primary sources given to be by Dr. Stephan and I will be finding online scans of these (or completing them myself) and then, once I figure out how to make folder on iWeb, I will be placing them up there to help keep myself organized. Right now, I'm planning on getting the maps done around halloween and then making sure that all my primary sources are in a digital format. That will make the usage of analytic tools much easier.

Pecha Kucha Presentation

Progress #1

Well, figuring out a topic and making it translate to a digital medium seemed like a simple task...

Until it wasn't.

Right now, I have met with professors to discuss where I want my topic to go, and until about 10 minutes ago, I wasn't sure. I have decided to paint a picture of what marriage looked like in the 1850's by looking at not only quantitative census data, but also literature and other primary sources about the topic.

This being set, I am hoping to meet with Angie in GIS tomorrow to discuss what a map would look like (population density and marriage) and then to talk to Dr. Stephan about more sources that I could use to enhance my image presented of marriage during this period. From there, I also am looking at authors on specific areas (counties) and utilizing their framework to look at marriage in the same area. This way there is not only a large-scale look at popularity of marriages in the U.S. but also there is a type of case-study into one particular area. 

Right now, I'm a bit overwhelmed because I know what I want to do (map, NGram, historiography on marriage, images) but I'm concerned about the uploading to iWeb and attempting to figure out the coding of that. What I'm planning on right now is gathering up all the pieces that I need and then putting them up at once and dealing with stylistic issues later on.

I'm hoping that my meeting with Angie will help me get more organized and give me more of a direction to go. I am still looking at working with a story-map framework to give some flow to the project, as well as to help me maintain a level of organization as I continually add to the sections of this project.

I'm a map, I'm a map, I'm a (site) map!

As promised, here's my initial site map (thanks to Gliffy for the software!)

Right now, this is a rough explanation of where my concept is headed. There are some blanks to fill (like letters about marriage) as well as the need to create the data charts from the census data and make the ArcGIS map of census data, but all in good time!

Concept: Check.

Announcing: My Project!

In looking at the development of a major, graduate-level project in the Digital Humanities, it is crucial to start with a plan, organization, knowledge, and fortitude. All these aspects play in the final production that is woven together to submit a new form of analysis into the pre-existing realm of a particular historical context.

Mostly, it helps to have a concept.

My focus is looking at what the concept of marriage looked like in 1850s-1870s America. By focusing on the antebellum period, there is an opportunity to chart both the basic census data (household members, male's education levels, and marriages) and the later, more thorough, census data that includes education levels of all in the house, the worth of the house, and the years of marriage and childbirth. The including of this data, along with primary sources in letters, diaries, and court records, allows for a more fleshed out examination of what marriage looked like during this period.

The main purpose of this is to look at how quantitative data reflects what was going on in the culture. One main question that appears is how do census trends reflect the literature and events of the time period. By looking at 1850-1870, not only is there a connection to my research in Italy (looking 200 years later) but also there is a change in the details provided in the census. Questions about this include “why the change in 1870?” as well as “how do these responses vary between the North and South?”

In looking at what the concept of marriage was in the North versus the South, there is a complication of what marriage in this period really was. I’m anticipating that text analysis, data charting and comparison, and word usage in literature/letters will provide the different experiences between the North and the South.  

In charting the census data, I would like to superimpose the numerical data of each household onto a map of each time period and use ArcGIS to show the changes in married households across the 20 year spread. This will reflect married versus unmarried households in the U.S. and will give a visual representation as to how many couples are experiencing these marriage trends. This also allows for a look at occupation trends, age trends, and location trends.

The project will also include, and be situated among, secondary research and American social historians' commentaries about marriage, the state it was in during this period, and the changes that occurred during this twenty year spread.

Besides simple data analysis (in the form of charts, trees, and graphs), the project will also create a timeline in which major events will be documented with marriage percentages shown to draw conclusions about the influence of American culture and events upon marriages (by using Timeline). Specific trends found in this examination will be backed up with primary letters, conversations, and other documents showing any correlation.

As of now, the plan is to put the census data into a more readable platform (considering excel) and then using that transcribed data to look at trends that occurred regionally, country-wide, and in other aspects of culture in the U.S. For instance, the rise in marriage during this period precedes the rise in marriage handbooks and novellas written during the 1860's (as shown through Google's Ngram tool). The charting of these trends allows for analysis as to what marriage looked like during the period, as well as how historians have perceived it.

My main sources include Census data from 1850, 1860, 1870 (all available online through the census bureau), specific marriage registries (available online through ancestry.com and archives), diaries of specific women (listed in flow chart, available through ILL), and letters (some available through archives, others not digitized).

The secondary research includes the main heavy hitters of the period: Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, Linda Kerber’s “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women’s Place”, Joan Cashin’s Our Common Affairs, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, Stephanie McCurry’s Masters of Small Worlds and  “Two Faces of Republicanism…”, Jan Lewis’ Pursuit of Happiness; Ann Douglas, Feminization of American Culture.

There will also be scholarship on courtship specifically (in the South)

-Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters

-Lori Glover, Southern Sons

-Steve Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South

And the North:

Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America

Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts:  A History of Courtship in America

Currently, a site-map is in the works (it will be linked either here or in a separatepost) to help navigate how the project will manifest itself in a digital space.