Closing Words

Interactive Timeline: Black Histories and Whaling

Cleaning Data is Hard; Finding Data is Harder

As you can probably tell, the brunt of work on this project fell on cleaning the data I acquired for it to be visualized. Even with my limited scope on New Bedford and the century I constrained myself to, cleaning and standardizing over 100,000 historical entries is a tiring process! While digital tools like clustering and regular expressions are helpful, I often found myself cleaning entries manually. No amount of digital proficiency will help you discern old English descriptions you don't understand or industry-specific terms without the due diligence. That being said, when all is said and done, it is disheartening to clean your data and find it left underpopulated. In my case, I wish I had more comprehensive lay records, but I guess I'll have to settle with reading the "lack of data" as its own hypothesis. Cleaning data is hard, but finding data, or trying to recreate it a la proxy, is even harder.

Digital Histories Cannot Exist in Vacuum

I am no expert on whaling, and to be quite frank, I didn't know what the practice of whaling was until I took this class! However, in order to first clean then read my data, I needed to read up on a sizable amount of whaling history. It would have been impossible to clean my dataset had I not known the standard format of or importance behind entries I was filtering through. Even if I had started with a clean dataset, the visualizations produced could be read is so many ways that I could have claimed unfounded, but "data-backed" hypothesis. Without the appropiate existing literature to guide you, crafting a digital history can dangerously misrepresent and even re-write history! The traditional history field and the new digital tools we use to understand more of our past bust work in tandem to produce meaningul and grounded conclusions. Read more on theory and digital history here.

Primary Sources Should be Viewed on a Macro and Micro Level

I have become quite the admirer of James Farr, the lead historian on black histories in the whaling industry. In a time of practically no digital tools, Farr carefully plucked specific customs records to weave a narrative claiming an upwards social mobility trend for black men at sea. While this project heavily relied on digital tools and methods, a good porition of what is presented, including my own understanding of the topic, comes from a historigraphy drawn from traditional primary and secondary sources. Writing history in the digital age must not overlook the traditional methods of writing histories. While exact numbers and precise geo-coded locations can factually support claims of macro trends throughout time, it's the deepdives into specific cases and close readings of primary sources that truly bring the past to life. 

Working with Data in the Humanities is Fun

This was a really fun project! There's only so much that can be said throught traditional historical methods that makes the nascent field of digital humanities so worthwhile to exploring! Cleaning data, outlining methods, and highlighting limitations all serve as worthy contributions to the historical field; emplying digital tools helps educate those in your field as an additional contribution outside of your scholarly findings. As an Applied Math and History concentrator, I know I will be taking at least two history classes next semester including an intensive tutorial and hope to use what I've learnt outside of Hist 1993. Until then, I've submitted this project to the Whaling History Project Gallery and hope to have this work featured. I think Farr would be proud.