The project that I chose to analyze for this blog post is Using Palladio to Visualize Ads. The project has created numerous maps that display the paths of runaway enslaved people from their initial locations to jails in different states. They used “jailers notices” which have both the slave owners location and the location of the jail that the enslaved person was found. The nodes for each of the maps are the different jails as they are the common location for all of the enslaved people, while the edges of the network are their enslaver’s location.
While the enslaved people don’t necessarily have any direct connections to one another otherwise, the thing that links them together is the jail where they were captured. In some of the maps, there are some clear patterns. In the Bexar County Jail node above, people chose to run in the south-east direction, where it can be reasoned that they were running towards the Mexico border In other locations, these kinds of patterns are not evident. From the Jefferson County Jail in Mississippi, the paths are much more scattered.
To create this project, the Rice University students used a data set of 19th century runaway slave ads. They used Voyant Tools to analyze the word choices in different ads both on a state and a national level. They kept the ads sorted by date, so they were able to look at word trends over time. They also used voyant to look at word trends in ads in different parts of a state. One of the major trends that they found was in the use of the word “African” over time. Its usage went down in later years in Texas compared to other states, which makes sense as when the Atlantic Slave Trade was abolished, Texas remained an independent nation. This is a super well done Digital Humanities project. Its usage of multiple tools and techniques was engaging and showed many interesting trends.
