How Shall We Represent Their Lives?

Sharon M. Leon |@sharonmleon

Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black

October 19, 2018

Mulledy Hall, 1903

Thomas F. Mulledy, S.J. (1794-1861)

The 1838 Community

Title Text

Jesuit Plantation Project

Enslaved Community owned by the Maryland Province Jesuits, 1740-1840

  • 1,099 people
  • 552 people with birth years
  • 390 children with at least one named parent

 

  • 32 Free people of color
  • 30 enslaved people owned by others

Derived data

  • Hand generated from document transcriptions
  • Individuals and relationships processed to People with Unique ID, and then de-dupped
  • Appearances processed to Events with participants
  • Event types: birth, baptism, marriage, death, inventory, health, sale, legal, labor, commerce, conditions, travel, punishment, run away
  • Imported to Omeka S to publish LOD
[1802 Dr St. Thomas's Manor in acct with Cash]
[1803]
[Jan]
26     To cash from Henny for 3 barrels corn @ $2   6.00  2.5.0
April 22    To Cash recd for sale of negro Constant, property of N.L. Sewall's estate  101.10.0

[opposite folio 1802 Contra Cr.]
[1803]
[Jan]
10    By do to do (the Taylor C. Layman) for making a servant's great coat  0.12.6
April 22  By Do [cash] to Mrs. Dorothy Digges for negro woman Jenny & her child  85.0.0


Linked Open Data

  • Vocabularies with properties
    • Dublin Core, FOAF, Bio, Relationship, Schema

 

  • Sentence format:
    • URI [property] URI
    • Isaac Hawkins, II [bio:childOf] Isaac Hawkins, I

 

  • Resource Templates make up a Data Model
    • People
    • Events
    • Location

Social Network Analysis?

sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com

Why consider SNA for this community?

  • Are these communities more or less stable than others?
  • Are these kinship networks more or less dense than others?
  • Can we see (and explain) meaningful change over time?

Questions about using SNA

  • What does it mean to analyze a community that is bounded and has very little control over their inclusion/movement?
  • With a significantly incomplete data set, what is the threshold at which social network analysis is revealing?

  • What are the appropriate visualizations to provide an entry point to this medium-sized collection of data points?

Newtown Community

Social Network Measures

  • Average Degree: Average number of connections

  • Density: Inclusiveness (total number of points minus the isolated ones) and the sum of the degrees of its points

  • Average Path Length: average number of edges from one point to another

Place Average Degree Density Average Path
White Marsh + Fingale 1.775 0.006 1.987
St. Thomas + Port Tobacco 1.808 0.011 1.671
 
Newtown 2.317 0.012 4.061
St. Inigoes 0.409 0.002 1.619
Bohemia 0.49 0.005 1.107

Marriage and Family

Major Contagions

  • Early 1790s: Small pox
  • Near constant malaria
  • 1827-1828: Typhoid

Manumission, Sale, and Purchase Events