Blog 3: Networks in Nebraska

Margie
Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:22:32 +0000
Week 3, blog, data visualization, DH Project Analysis, Network analysis, reflection

This week we were tasked with looking at a network analysis Digital Humanities project. I decided to look at the Homestead Nebraska project, created by some researchers looking at how Homesteading in the American West was an important process in the forming of farms. These researchers used homesteading data and networking to help study how homesteading shaped the American West.

About page for the researcher’s finding for homesteading

Let’s looks a bit at the network that these researchers decided to build:

What are the nodes? What are the edges?

Homesteading was a process where individuals could make a claim to land and then be verified by other homesteaders that they did indeed lay claim to certain land. Hence the edges (or connections) were these testimonies that individuals gave for each other. The website defines them as “socio-legal” connections. Thus our nodes are the individuals who are homesteading. This includes both those that are making a claim to land and those who are supporting their claim.

The network and homesteading connections

What sort of interactions does this project allow?

This project allows you to look at small collections of different networks, grouped by geography. Instead of this being one massive network, it has many networks that are not interconnected. It also has options to look at these networks by community, leaders, or geography. The project is deeply interactive, but hard to pull together data as a casual observer flipping through tabs.

Snippet of a Network

Above is an example of a specific network from the homesteading data. I appreciated the color coding and highlighted connections. I did find it a bit hard to really get much out of the data since there were so many networks and so many possible people. I think as a whole these networks can do a lot for research, but aren’t super great for casual viewing such as what I was doing for this project.