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Visualizing the Origins, Itineraries, and Destinations of 94,910 Liberated Africans (1807-1862): A custom interactive map for dynamically aggregating and disaggregating a sparse historical dataset

Published: 10 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Digital history occupies an interesting place in research computing because its data is both large and structured enough to aggregate for compelling insights, and sparse and idiosyncratic enough to create ethical and epistemological problems for aggregation and imputation. In 2022, our team published the names of 94,910 individuals who were enslaved in Africa, and subsequently liberated, along with their itineraries and other personal data. This people-oriented data provided a compelling challenge for the team, who wanted to visualize a highly-ramified spatial network that connected directly to named individuals. Plugging into the database's existing Django framework, I built a Python pipeline in NetworkX for indexing 3,551 discrete, splined routes in a multidigraph in order to efficiently display these individuals’ convergent and divergent itineraries, and to integrate the map's displayed data into the search interface for more interactive, exploratory user experience.

Reference

[1]
Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Philip Misevich, and Olatunji Ojo. 2014. The Diaspora of Africans Liberated from Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century. In Journal of African History, 55 (2014), 374-369 at 349. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853714000371

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  1. Visualizing the Origins, Itineraries, and Destinations of 94,910 Liberated Africans (1807-1862): A custom interactive map for dynamically aggregating and disaggregating a sparse historical dataset

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        PEARC '23: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2023: Computing for the Common Good
        July 2023
        519 pages
        ISBN:9781450399852
        DOI:10.1145/3569951
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Published: 10 September 2023

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        Author Tags

        1. data visualization
        2. digital history
        3. digital humanities
        4. geographic sankey
        5. network graph

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