For my project I am going to compare the military occupation of the south to the literacy rates provided by the census data. I then want to compare this to the number of law makers from each county. My data sets will include Eric Foner’s “Freedoms Lawmakers“, Gregory Downs’ Mapping occupation, and the census data from 1870. The Census data and the data from Mapping Occupation both exist already in excel form, the data from “Freedoms Lawmakers” will need to be retrieved from scans and put into excel sheet format. This could be achieved by scanning the book and having a computer pull out the names and places. From here the data will need to be put into flourish along with a map file that goes down to the county level. Visualizing all 3 of these data sets on one map is going to be difficult, so creating two maps may be necessary. Military occupation will best be visualized by points on the map, while law makers and literacy rates will best be visualized with heat or frequency maps. In history there is often more than one reason or cause for an event, I want to investigate reasons for some areas having more African American law makers than others, not necessarily the quantity but the percentage based on the population of African Americans in the county. My hypothesis is that areas with higher literacy rates and closer proximity to union outposts will have a higher frequency of African American’s in office. These comparisons will help educated viewers to better understand the conditions that would help promote the success of African American law makers during reconstruction.
Spring 2020
I am very interested in how your project plans to pull together these two seemingly disparate types of data into a single narrative. I think you have a strong case to be made for the correlation between literacy rates and the presence of military occupation, but the overall impact of this reality on the presence of black lawmakers throughout the region could be clearer. If there IS a correlation, I want to encourage you to think about how these Black lawmakers are utilizing certain opportunities and advantages to bolster their political expression and activities. As you move forward in the project and build your annotated bibliography, think about consulting books with research on the accessibility of education during Reconstruction. Many black soldiers during the Civil War learned to read and write through their participation in the army—so there is an impulse for Black education in army-occupied areas of the South, but the question is how this expands (and/or contracts) throughout Reconstruction. How does this play into Eric Foner’s understanding of Reconstruction as an “unfinished revolution” and why? These are just some thoughts to consider as your project progresses.
As for the visualization component, you will probably need to construct individual maps and then use another tool, like Juxtapose JS (juxtapose.knightlab.com) to compare them in an easy and seamless way. Flourish might offer something similar to this on their visualizations page, but I haven’t looked into it.