Students and scholars at Rice University created a site that showcased a few digital history methods that used a sample data set of nineteenth-century runaway slave ads.
Below is one of their data visualization with Mapping Points:
Using Palladio and jailers’ notices, they attempted to show the pathways of runaway slaves from their slave owners. Although the features of Palladio were limited, they used the “Count by” option, which modifies the sizes of the nodes based on the frequency of a location in the data set. An assumption that can be made is that the larger nodes are the jail locations while the small nodes are the locations of slave owners because a jail could “congregate” slaves from anywhere. Therefore, the edges are the pathways of a runaway slave.
Another digital history method that they used was text-mining (using Voyant)
