Data Visualization and Draft Final Project

Data visualization can serve as an incredible resource both for teaching about history and for researchers looking for historical trends. It is very hard to process long lists of numbers, such as those seen in census records or other sources of historic data. But once you see the numbers on a graph or chart, they start to make sense.

As a historian, seeing data in graph form can help shape questions for research. For instance, if you look at the population for a certain city and see that there is a drop one decade, or the start of a growth trend, that can raise questions about what caused these changes. Then the population data can be compared with other data sets that the census might give, such as number of people who moved from other locations, education level of the population, average household salary, numbers of people employed in certain professions, etc., to learn more about the historic happenings in that city.

Census data is the easiest to access for populations. However, depending on what you are studying, you can draw from all kinds of data sets. If you are studying Civil War history, it might be interesting to create data visualization of the number of combatants in each battle on each side, number of deaths on each side, and how those numbers changed over the course of the war. Or if you want to look at something like how building a new company headquarters or a transit system in a town impacts the population, you could create a data visualization of the census data from shortly before the event through the decades after. There are many ways in which data visualization can be useful.

My final project website has been published in draft form. It can be found at: https://sms244924.wixsite.com/cherokeecarvings. There is still a lot of work to do. On the artists list page, each of the artists' names will link to their own page on my site with information, photos of the objects, and signatures of the artist. I will also add additional information about the history of the art form. I also need to finish the "Sources" and "To Find Out More" sections on the "About" page. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. I welcome any feedback. Thank you!