Author: budde

Author: Elizabeth Budd

As this term draws to a close, I’m pausing to consider the work I’ve done this term. As I stop to consider it, this term has been an interesting mix of both new tasks and at the same time the continuation of previous tasks. A small example of this is social media. I’ve been in charge of the DHA Twitter account for a little while, but this was the first time I began to use a tweet scheduler – same task, but a new method. (Side note: I love the tweet scheduler! I can write up tweets once a week and not have to worry about forgetting to send them at the right time!)

My work on Team Workhouse this term is similar. I’ve been involved in Team Workhouse for almost two years now, but this term I took on new tasks in the Workhouse project. The first new task I took on was being a Teaching Assistant (TA) for the History course, Bringing the English Past to Virtual Life (explore the course blog!), and as part of that I both attended class and held office hours for student help. Attending class as a TA and providing in-class help were both totally new experiences for me, and I explored some thoughts about being a TA in a recent blog post that you can read here! This term I also continued working on the Virtual Workhouse Digital Archive Omeka site, which last term and over winter break I did extensive work with the metadata of the collections housed on the site.

This term, however, I had a go at wireframing for the site. If you don’t know what wireframing is (which I didn’t before I did it), it is essentially sketching out the basic layout of a website in order to have a concrete idea what you want it to be before actually working on website itself. I tried it out using Balsamiq (a wireframing tool) and really enjoyed it! It was fun to not just react to technology but think more purposefully about what the goals of the site were and how to design the layout to best accomplish those goals.

Something entirely new I’m about to start working on is learning LaTeX. I am now a board editor on Carleton’s Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies and I’m going to be working on the website (which I know how to do) and typesetting the papers chosen for the journal – this uses LaTeX, which I don’t know how to do. I don’t have any experience with LaTeX, but I’m excited to start learning. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from my work as a DHA, it’s that there’s always something new to learn!

Author: Elizabeth Budd

I’ve known for a while that communication is really important when working in teams, but this term really drove home for me how crucial it is. I spent a good amount of time this term working on prepping and uploading archival images of workhouse documents from London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as part of the Virtual Workhouse project (you can see the fruits of our labors here!). Tyler and I were both working on these spreadsheets so there were a lot of moving pieces, with having to keep each other in the loop about our progress, checking in with Austin and Sarah about problems we were running into, and talking with Susannah about unexpected issues we came across (like an index in the front of two of the volumes!).

Trello, which is a new piece of our workflow this year, was very helpful for me. Tyler and I could record what we had done each time working on the spreadsheet in a shared place to keep track of our progress. I could tell him that I had finished the titles in Volume 3 but ran into problems with the dates, and he could tell me that he had finished the identifiers in the same volume and fixed the dates. This way we could keep track of what we had finished so neither of us was doing work the other already had.

Another aspect of communication that I found really important was communication with myself (essentially, documentation). Since we were dealing with the spreadsheets of six volumes of a workhouse minute book, there was a lot of data and a lot of images. I could not count on my memory to keep track of things. Even if I noticed that image 84 in Volume 2 had to be discussed, there was very little chance I would remember that. So I had to make sure to write it down for both myself and others and clearly state exactly why it had to be discussed. The same was true of meetings. I met with Susannah to ask about unexpected pages, and then brought that discussion to a meeting with Tyler and Sarah. Without my notes from the meeting with Susannah, I would not have been able to remember what we had talked about and what her suggestions had been. Likewise, I wouldn’t have remembered our decisions from meeting with Tyler and Sarah to implement them on the spreadsheets. While I’ve known for a while about the value of making good notes to communicate with both others and myself, the high volume of data that we have been working with for the workhouse minutes has driven home to me the absolutely critical nature of such documentation.

Author: Elizabeth Budd

Building off of Martha’s previous post, I’m going to discuss some challenges of mapping projects with old maps. Old maps pose challenges to digital projects. In particular, the spatial arrangements of many old maps don’t match modern day maps of the same area. A path made up of geographic coordinates (such as on Google Maps) is not guaranteed to be compatible with old maps. In addition, there is a fine line in many of these maps between maps and city views, especially in many early modern European prints.

One example of these map/city-view that is useful to think with is the woodcut of Rome from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle. 

This woodcut image clearly shows Rome – in addition to the label (which I will expand a bit on later), there are many recognizable sites – the papal palace, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Pantheon, and the Colosseum. It is not a simple city view – the geographic relation between these sites shows the general layout of the city. However, trying to plot a path (or even just points) on a georeferenced version of this map is not feasible.

Georeferencing warps the map image, trying to get it to fit the points on the image to relevant points in the real world. Sometimes this warping can be very extreme, especially for certain kinds of transformations:

The control points (which link the image to geographic points) on this map do not line up well, since the spatial arrangement of the map/woodcut image do not line up with their geographic locations. This image shows the difference between the points on the 1493 map and the present day map, shown as blue lines.

Another problem with a map like the Nuremberg Chronicle woodcut is that we don’t know what all the landmarks are. There are many church structures, but only a few are labelled. In addition, there are features that seem to be missing – for example, it is difficult to distinguish Tiber Island on the woodcut, which is a major landmark. Furthermore, the scale of the buildings pose problems. It is relatively easy to use the center of the Pantheon as a point on a present day map, but where on the woodcut image is the “center” of the Pantheon? In all, attempting to georeference and plot points on a map such as the Nuremberg Chronicle woodcut image of Rome is frustrating, inaccurate, and ultimately provides no additional insight. In fact, the extreme warping of the image makes it more difficult to understand the and the data represented in relation to it.

My attempt to chart a path on the Nuremberg Chronicle map

The closest point is the Colosseum – nothing else lines up very closely at all (the path is supposed to go from the Colosseum to the Pantheon, to one side of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, to the Castel Sant’Angelo, to the Vatican). The result is not illuminating and does not contribute any new knowledge, and in fact doesn’t serve either purpose well; it is difficult to interpret the Nuremberg Chronicle map, and it is almost impossible to know which landmarks are denoted by the path.

Can we trust the labels?

In the Nuremberg Chronicle, no, we can’t! Rome is clearly correct – the sites confirm the label. Other cities are like this, including, for instance, Krakow, which gives specific labels of a part of the city and reflects the city layout. However, for more minor cities, the Nuremberg Chronicle often uses the same woodcut for different cities.

In fact, the same woodcut is used for nine images (see below). These images include: Napoli, Perugia, Mantua, Ferrara, Damascus, Bena (I’m not sure what city this refers to), a German province (not sure about this one either), Spain, and Macedonia. While Italian cities may have similar styles, I cannot accept that Napoli, Damascus, Spain and Macedonia literally looked like these woodcuts. Therefore, not only do these images provide difficulties in terms of spatial alignment, but we also cannot always accept them at face value, because they may be no more than a generic representation of a city than a visual representation reflecting an actual cityscape.

Sources:

The color woodcut images come from the digitized University of Cambridge Nuremberg Chronicle (CC BY-NC 3.0): (the page numbers are: Bena 80r, Damascus 23v, Ferrara 159r, Macedonia 275r, Mantua 84r, Napoli 42r, Germany? 284v, Perugia 48v, Spain 289v).

The woodcut image of Rome is from the digitized copy in Morse Library, Beloit College. Last accessed 16 October 2017.

RBMS/BSC Latin Place Names File provided help with place names.

Author: Elizabeth Budd

A significant part of my work continues to be for Team Workhouse, including the work I did over winter break for Professor Susannah Ottaway ‘89. My earlier post detailed my process for determining the locations of parishes in England in order to better understand the use of workhouses for poor relief in the late 18th and early 19th century. I continued to find locations over break, and then double checked those locations I had found to make sure I hadn’t missed any parishes and so I was confident in the new locations. Finally, though, I finished that and reached a point where I could leave the spreadsheet behind and begin mapping! Of course, I quickly learned that you can never really leave the spreadsheet behind.

I quickly ran into a problem: I was working from home, so I only had access to ArcGIS online, which, while a great tool, is not as powerful as the desktop version. The online version will only take up to 1000 entries in a CSV upload at a time, and the database has a little over 3300 entries! I was able to get around this by splitting the spreadsheet into four separate uploads, broken up along county lines to make my life a bit easier. I finally got all four CSVs into ArcGIS online, double checking that all locations were in fact in the map document.

Once I had all the locations in, I was finally able to step back and look at the data as a whole (insert my rough map of all the workhouses colored by county). I soon noticed what looked to be another problem. Since the parishes were colored by county, there were some obvious outliers. In addition, I had imported a layer that showed the 1851 county boundaries, and many of these outliers did not match the county boundaries of that layer. I went through the counties again, looking at parishes that were at least three miles outside of the county boundaries, recording those that fell outside those boundaries to later check to see if the location was correct, and potentially correct it.

While I did find some incorrect coordinates, many of them were actually correct. As I dug into the parishes I thought were incorrect, I learned that many county borders had changed, and many had even had parts of their counties that were not continuous with the rest! Fortunately, I was able to find a layer file of the English and Welsh counties in 1831 courtesy of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure , when many of these exclaves still existed. Using this layer, it was much easier to visually check that parishes seemingly outside their counties were in fact within their boundaries. Once again, the county layer made my life much easier – instead of going back through my spreadsheet, quicker visual checks were now possible for what I thought were incorrect – and many did turn out to be correct.

Now that I’m confident in the parish locations, my next steps are to really dive into the maps and cartography. The data for the maps is all there, but the task now is to create polished maps for both print and online publication. Despite some of my struggles with both the technology and the content (I had no idea that counties could have exclaves!), the use of GIS was a valuable tool, not just for the cartography, but also for the vital step of confirming that parishes were actually where they were supposed to be.

Author: Elizabeth Budd

Most my work this term has been part of Team Workhouse, which is a research project that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the Gressenhall Workhouse in Norfolk, England during the 18^th century in order to better understand the lived experience of workhouse inmates (my research this summer and presentation at the Midwest Conference on British Studies is also part of the Team Workhouse). This term, I’ve been working mainly on locating British parishes in the early 19^th century. Our goal is to create maps and explore spatial relations of workhouses in England, based on an 1803 Parliamentary report. Professor Susannah Ottaway ’89 and others have already done significant work on finding the locations of the parishes and other places mentioned in the report. There are still many that don’t have locations, however, and that is what I’ve been working on. Although we ultimately want to know where the workhouses were, that information is not accessible to us at this time. We can find the location the churches, and often workhouses were very close to churches. In addition, the maps will be show larger areas, so individual parishes will be relatively small. As such, we have decided to use church buildings as approximations for the parishes and their poor relief.

My typical process looks like this: I would have a parish name (for example, Dowley, Magna, Wellington Division, Bradford Hundred in Shropshire), and would begin on a genealogy website to find out some preliminary information about the parish. I can typically get a church name (for example, Holy Trinity), and I then look to the Historic England pages for more information on the church building. This is the Historic England page for Holy Trinity, Great Dowley, from which I know that the current building is from 1845, although the site is older. I find the church on Google Maps (with the map on Historic England to help me), and use the coordinates for the parish.

Some places pose more challenges and require more investigation. In London, many of the parish churches of parishes listed in the 1803 report were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and never rebuilt. For those parishes, I used this map, which shows London before the Fire. Even so, the streets have changed since then, so I had to estimate where the churches would have been. Another very common issue I have run into is name changes. “Warnslow” becomes “Warslow,” “Laytham” becomes “Layham,” and “Monythustoine” becomes “Mynyddyslwyn” (or “Mynyddislwyn” or “Mynydd Islwyn”). Some name changes are close enough that I am confident they are the same place, especially given the extra information, such as church name or county. Others, I find sources about the different names (especially that last one) to confirm that they are indeed the same place. For the most difficult parishes, I often had to resort to Google searches, old maps (there are many here!), and any other resources I could find on small parishes. I increasingly appreciate parish websites that have histories of their own parishes, which have been very valuable to me during this processes. It has taken many hours, but I have almost finished finding the unknown parishes, so before long we can move on to mapping the parishes and exploring the spatial patterns of 18^th century poor relief.