Visualizing Historical Data, And The Rise Of "Digital Humanities" | Fast Company
All historians encounter them, at some point in their careers: Vast troves of data that are undeniably useful to history—but too complex to make narratively interesting. For Stanford’s Richard White, an American historian, these were railroad freight tables. The reams of paper held a story about America, he knew. It just seemed impossible to tell it.
Impossible to tell in a traditional way, that is. White is the director of the Stanford University Spatial History Project, an interdisciplinary lab at the university that produces “creative visual analysis to further research in the field of history.” (The images in this post are taken from the project’s many visualizations.) Recent announcements on the project site announce “source data now available” (openness is one of the project’s tenets) on such topics as “Mapping Rio,” “Land Speculation in Fresno County: 1860-1891,” and “When the Loss of a Finger is Considered a ‘Minor’ Injury.”
That last, bizarre, entry is part of the spatial history that White specializes in: railroads in the American West (the injury in question is part of a data set on railroad-related accidents in Colorado, 1884-1885). “Shaping the West,” as White dubs his project, is about “developing tools to represent and analyze visually how and to what degree the railroads created new spatial patterns and experiences in the 19th-century American West.”
