The metadata project I chose to analyze was “Using Metadata to find Paul Revere” by Kieren Healy, a Sociology professor at Duke University. I quite liked that the article was written in an almost in-character style—it was really nice to have a break from academic articles and read something that was both a bit silly and very educational.
The nodes of the project are a table of people active during the revolutionary war, and the edges represent the organizations that connected them. Here is what that looks like in table form:
And here’s what it looks like as a web:
You can also download the repository of data from Github, leading to the ability to further analyze the arrays of data.
The data was compiled through the appendix of David Hackett Fischer’s book Paul Revere’s Ride. Healy compiled the data into rows, with a 1 indicated whether a person was in an organization.
Through this table, we can see that both John Adams and Samuel Adams were part of both the North Caucus and Long Room Cub, while a Dr. Allen and Nathaniel Appleton were only part of the former. By organizing people into what organizations they belonged to, then the number of people organizations had in common, Healy could deduce how relationships overlapped and create an information web with nodes and edges. Clusters of people illustrate who was part of certain organizations, and some dots appear in the middle, showing the people through which these organizations were linked. Through organizing this metadata, Kealy found one person who was centrally located between all of these social structures: Paul Revere.
I’ve forgotten most of my AP US History lessons, so I, like the character Kealy takes on in this article, don’t know much about Paul Revere other than his midnight ride in which he warned the colonists that “the British are coming!” However, through the web this metadata reveals, Kealy, the audience, and I can see that Revere was involved in many organizations during the revolutionary war, and therefore many social circles as well. This is useful as it may add context as to why Revere was chosen for the midnight ride (many people knew and trusted him). It also showcases a fascinating aspect of metadata: that we can learn incredibly important pieces of a person’s life, all the while not really knowing who they were.
2 thoughts on “Paul Revere’s (metadata) ride”
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This is a really cool project. I appreciate how easy your blog post was to understand and read. When I was looking at the Paul Revere website it was not this concise or well formatted. I wonder if any of the other people near the middle of the chart were considered to do Paul’s ride?
I agree with you Cullen, it’s hard to read the original blog post let alone the web of connections. I remember learning / googling that William Dawes also rode to warn people of the British advance. I think it would be interesting to see if he was quite central on the graph too. Additionally, I wish that this graph had as much of a high level of interactiveness as the similar graph: 5 degrees of Francis Bacon. That way we would be able to take a closer look and determine whether Dawes had similar levels of social connection.