Network Mapping and the Civic Club of Philadelphia

The Civic Club of Philadelphia:
Women on School Boards Committee, Nominees and Elections, 1908-1911

For the past few months I have been playing around with Gephi, an open source graphic networking tool in order to map the Civic Club of Philadelphia's attempts to place women on ward school boards in Philadelphia. The visualization I have ended up with displays the Civic Club nominations, the women who were elected, the wards they lived in, and the year(s) the events took place. This post primarily focuses on the process of making the graph and speculates about the ways scholars, students, or any interested party could use it.

Beginning this project, I spent an enormous amount of time organizing data. The club's campaigning for women on school boards started in 1895. For that year they published a great account of the entire campaign. Unfortunately, beyond 1895 I had to rely on often incomplete newspaper announcements of the club's activity.  In the end, I focused on the years 1908 to 1911 because the Civic Club Bulletin (first printed in late 1907) published complete lists of Civic Club nominees.

(Note: The Civic Club of Philadelphia Records are held at the Historic Society of Pennsylvania. The archives do not have a finding aid, but were well organized internally before the club donated them. Listings of nominations are in the Newspaper Clippings binders and the Civic Club Bulletins are compiled in volumes. Link to records page.)

Master Excel: Women on School Boards, with notes and sources

Gephi graphs are created out of nodes (the dots) and edges (the lines connecting the dots). At first, I was not sure if this type of network mapping would work for my data. The women would never be connected directly to other women, the wards would connect with the same people, and how to visualize both the women and their status in the campaign was a mystery. I eventually decided to make nodes out of women, wards, and events. Each node has a numeric Id and a label. The edge list connects the events to women, and the women to wards though labeling sources and targets.

Edge CSV for Gephi

The fun started once I uploaded the data to Gephi. The layout and color potions are addicting to play with and can create some amazing images. Nevertheless, an image like the one below, however awesome, is completely useless for my purposes. Figuring out how to format the graph so that it could actually tell me something required a combination of historic and aesthetic thinking that I enjoyed employing, especially since usually I am entirely one or the other. 

Playing with Formats in Gephi

The layout I decided on was to locate the ward nodes in their approximate location on this historic map of wards in Philadelphia from 1914. This would add an extra dimension to the graph and place the club's activity in a spacial context. 

Philadelphia Ward Map, 1914 (original here)

The resulting layout dispersed the wards, and an additional layout consolidated the women around where they lived. I manually dragged out the nominations to the left, and the elections to the right. Had I been thinking more ahead I would have also located these outside of the perimeter of the map.

Wards Locked and Formatting almost Finished

With the layout decided on, I still had to figure out the color scheme. Like layouts, pretty colors distract me, and finding a scheme that works with the data was a challenge.

Cool Looking, Though Not Very Useful, Graphic Display

Eventually, I decided on a red to blue scheme, where red is the earliest year, 1908, and blue is the latest, 1911. The nominations are desaturated and the elections are fully saturated. Ideally, this allows viewers to more easily see who was nominated, elected, where and when. Though still a little cluttered, especially around center city, the information is much clearer in the final graph.

Final Graphic (minus map)

This final graph, and the overlay with the ward map at the top of this post, provides a way to understand the Civic Club's activity and local school election that is difficult with the lists of women published in newspapers and bulletins. As a visual learner and thinker, I often feel a little left out of the mainstream historic discipline because it is so partial to strictly written sources and written interpretations. Visualizations can force people to approach their sources in a different way than they would if they were writing.

I am still working with how to interpret and present the graph. Currently, it serves as a good platform to ask more questions about the topic and to generate interest in a largely unknown movement.  

History Games

I may have spent too much time playing some of these games, but hey, games are fun! For this post I will dissect the games available from the McCord Museum. There are plenty of popular games that employ, whether appropriately or not, historical time periods, characters and themes. The McCord Museum’s games provide a solid platform to discuss the pros and cons of a museum integrating games into their educational outreach efforts.

The McCord Museum offers a variety of games, from role-playing social customs to trivia. All of them are relatively short, taking from 3-10 minutes. The length and variety of games allows visitors get a taste of history without making a huge time commitment. This leads me to believe that their target audience is casual visitors to the website who have an interest in the museum. The games would be fun for students, but I do not get the feeling playing them that the game creators had a specific K-12 educational agenda.

Even though I do not believe students were the only audience, I was impressed that a few of the games contained the right level of snarkiness popular with the 10-14 year age range. When my character got ran over by a horse and carriage then flew off the screen, I was surprised. I was also interested and kept playing enjoying the experience of both choosing period-correct etiquette and watching the ridiculous things that happened when I did not.

One aspect of the McCord Museum games that could be a turn off for some people is that they are specific to Montreal. (I did not realize this until I got stuck on a question that involved liquor laws in the 1920s – not the same in Canada.) This may be where a museum need to question what their purpose is in putting games on their website and who are the games for. Should they have games for people unfamiliar with the institution? Assuming that a website will get non-local traffic, how much background should the game designers assume players have? I did not get frustrated in not knowing much Canadian history because the McCord Museum offered a number of quick games to play, yet I could see how I would in a longer game.

In general I like the aesthetic of these games, but looks also highlight how quickly the technology becomes out of date. The images in almost all of the games were too small for me to really see on my computer. For some of the games this did not matter, but when it was a quiz and I had to answer a question about the image, the game became problematic. Another problematic situation occurred when a scene change notified me of a “Plug-in Failure,” in ‘Mind Your Manners.’ Eventually, the game started working again, but the only reason I stayed long enough to see that happen was because I am writing this post. Games can be great ways for institutions to move their message forward, but they also need constant supervision and updating to stay relevant. Even with their kinks, the games add a needed sense of humor and play to history that historians sometimes leave out of their academic lives.

Omeka Site!

Here is my Omeka site!

The concept for the site was to annotate the children's book Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton. First published in 1903, the book is a great platform to talk about how people reacted to industrialization, the conservation movement, the technical education movement, and the popular depiction of American Indians.

Currently, only content from Part 1 of the book is up (I wanted to digitize the illustrations myself because I did not like the ones online). There are still some little things that I would like to add and expand on, particularly uploading more historic content and expanding each section of the exhibit and, of course, digitizing and uploading content from the rest of the book. With more time I would also probably experiment with the Simple Pages plugin and see if I could customize a page where a digitized copy of the book would be available directly on the website.

In any case this is it so far.

Two Little Savages, full page illustration, page 22 (Header: page 36, cropped)

Historic Philadelphia Schools (Playing with Google Maps Engine)

(If that map is uncooperative the original from Google Maps Engine is here.)

The initial idea for this map was to chart the construction of Philadelphia schools throughout the city’s history.

I went to the School District’s website which has well organized data sets available through their Open Data Initiative. Unfortunately for the historian, this data only has schools which are still, or at least until recently, opened. It does not contain all the schools that were opened in the past.

Luckily, I remembered that few months ago researching the centralization of the school district I came across the School District of Philadelphia’s Nomination Form for the National Register of Historic Places. (The Form) The form nominated sixty-four school buildings constructed between 1825 and 1937. The school district also periodized its buildings to align with major school laws, the most influential of which was the centralization of the school district in 1905.

Going to the National Register's website and filtering their data on enabled me to acquire a decent list of historic schools in Philadelphia. Because this data does not contain when the schools opened I had to search each school individually to get the dates. (This is why there’s not more schools on the map.) Another problem with the National Register is that it largely contains the schools that were architecturally significant and well preserved. It is not a list of all the schools that the district built throughout its history.

Importing the data to Google Maps Engine did not involve any hiccups, yet I did spend a good amount of time playing with the design specifications. I decided to use simple circles to make the locations of the schools and a gradiated fill color to signify when the school was built. Because I only imported twenty schools, I broke the dates into three ranges, 1848 to 1905 (pre-centralization), 1906 to 1929 (centralization plus time for the city to acquire land/architect/contractor/construct the school), and 1930 to 1938. With a full data set I would pick more specific periods to account for other historical events such as the increases in population in the late nineteenth century.

What I like about this map (or more accurately, what this map would look like with all the data) is that it simultaneously displays where and when the city built schools. While this map is only a sampling of the schools that were built, a map with a more complete data source would be an effective research tool to study how administrative laws affect schools. How quickly did newer schools come to areas which were experiencing population growth? What does that say about the city government? It would also be a good tool to study population growth and the city’s responses to population growth.

The last addition to make the map complete would be to layer it with a map of school closings. A map of school closings would give a more complete history. Schools close for a variety of reasons: population loss, outdated buildings and outdated function are only a few reasons why schools close. For example, many of the schools, especially ones from the thirties were constructed over older schools. Having a layered map would highlight population shifts and also which neighborhoods the city is invested in. 

History Visualizations

Women on School Boards, 1895

Women on School Boards, 1897

          

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of word clouds by themselves. Yet, when I imagine an exhibit with a variety of materials, a large word cloud wall decal could definitely add to the experience. For these images I used Wordle to create two word clouds (inspired by the class exercise) to compare election rhetoric in different years.

About the topic: The Civic Club of Philadelphia formed in 1894 and immediately acted on an agenda that included an array of education reforms. Though the club was keen on eliminating the ward boards that were largely in control of the city’s schools, they decided to take advantage of the ability of women to serve on school boards and suggest candidates for election. Thusly formed, the Woman on School Boards Committee organized election campaigns for women. The source texts for these images were two campaign fliers advocating for the election of women on Philadelphia’s district school boards, one from 1895 and one from 1897.

The 1895 campaign was the first campaign that the club organized. It focused almost exclusively in the Seventh Ward. The 1895 flier was titled “To Our Neighbors and Friends, the Women of the Seventh Ward” and consisted of a list of reasons why women should serve on school boards. The language of this flier is friendly and community focused. It assures the voters that women will focus on the children. Because the tone of the rhetoric was friendlier, I chose a colorful, warm palate, a brighter background, and simple lower-case text.

The 1897 flier was titled “To Fathers and Mothers. Five Reasons why you should support Women Candidates for the School Boards” similarly lists why women should serve. However, the language of the 1897 campaign embodied a new approach for the Civic Club. The language of this campaign was more aggressively gendered than the one in 1895. This campaign stated outright that women, because they were women, would not only be just as good as male candidates, they would be better. Because this campaign was more aggressive I chose darker, cool colors, a cloudier background, and bolder font.

The resulting images are meant to portray the different tones of the campaigns. Being a little critical, they might be too distinct. The source text was short, making it easy for a single repeated word to appear twice as large as anything else. But all in all, they do show a distinct difference in the way these women perceived themselves and organized their political activity.

(The background image is of the Alice Lippincott School, named after a Civic Club member who was involved with the school and died in 1894. Source: PhillyHistory.org)  

Digital Storytelling: A Discussion

(Note: I did not read ahead on our course syllabus, and incidentally touched on some of the points of this weeks topic on my last post. Sorry!)

(Another Note: My former life as a children’s librarian and my background as a visual artist/illustrator biases and informs this discussion in ways that are too many to tell.)

I love stories, and history is full of them. For historians, especially public historians, digital storytelling can be a great way to captivate an audience, introduce people to the field, communicate complicated interpretations and just have fun with doing what we love. From what I understand the definition of what counts as “digital storytelling” is overwhelmingly broad, and as of yet, generally undefined. Yet, thinking in terms of how other forms of storytelling are defined I like to think of digital storytelling as storytelling that conforms to the limitations of digital technologies, and particularly to people’s expectations of, say, a website. This is not to say that those limitations cannot be tested. The adaptability of digital technologies may be the most exciting thing about digital storytelling.

Last week I looked at the multimedia film/website Welcome to Pine Point and the blog Small Town Noir. These are still my favorite history related websites though outside of history Dangers of Fracking may take the amount-of-time-spent-staring-at-computer prize. This week I tried to focus on examples that are manageable for a final project. The first tool that I came across was Meograph, which many news organizations use, but can also be used for history, like this brief overview of Women’s Rights in the USA (made by KVWM San Diego). Part of me (the control freak) does not like having to concede to the capabilities of a tool like this, yet it does offer fast and easy ways to create complex histories.

Another example that kept running through my head was the Drunk History series on YouTube. Though Comedy Central has acquired the series, at its inception Drunk History was made for the Internet. I know it is not “History,” and is ripe with troubling interpretations and flat-out inaccuracies, yet the first episode (here), to date, has had over five million views. There might be something that we can learn from the format, in this case an absurd YouTube short, that we would not learn if we let our disciplinary boundaries restrict us.

Naysayers of digital storytelling for the purpose of history would likely say that digital media could easily dumb down content, exclude multiple perspectives, misrepresent history as fact rather than interpretation, and convey too much of a linear progression of historical happenings. Moreover, from the public historian’s standpoint, digital storytelling can strip away the shared authority in which we are proud. On one hand, these things are true. They are also true for articles, books, documentaries, exhibits and pretty much all modes of expression.

From bedtime stories and campfire tales to novels and film people are familiar with a range of storytelling techniques. Scholars writing historic monographs often use the narrative form and storytelling conventions to convey their argument. Moreover, we, the academics, understand that while history is multidimensional and dynamic, an historic monograph is the singular interpretation of its author. So why do we question putting a similar form to the public? People are smart and are capable of recognizing that multiple perspectives exist, even when only one is presented. 

In short, storytelling is an integral mode of communication among people. While digital storytelling has the potential to mask meaning with novelty, forgoing storytelling would deny the very thing that attracts most people to history in the first place.

Proposal for Final Project (preliminary)

Initially, I had a hard time coming up with an idea for a project. The readings and sites from this week inspired me to think about how history and art intersect, an activity that required some inbreeding between my historical interests and background as a visual artist (where I have traditionally relegated storytelling). I feel that this project could serve as an opportunity to try to bridge the gap.

The sites Welcome to Pine Point, Small Town Noir, and the Digital Vaults of the National Archives motivated me to think creatively. Pine Point and Small Town Noir both told poignant and touching stories, feelings that I would like my project to also radiate. The Digital Vaults succeeded in demonstrating the connections and complexities that a single era/event/person entails.

Currently, I am researching the Civic Club of Philadelphia and their efforts to centralize the School District of Philadelphia. Prior to 1905 locally elected ward boards ran Philadelphia schools with their individual neighborhoods, monitored by a loosely constructed and minimally powerful central Board of Education. The Civic Club was one organization among many Progressive Era reform groups. Specifically, I would like to tell the story of one campaign that the Civic Club ran in 1895 to get two women of the club elected to the Ward Board of the Seventh Ward.

I do not have access to much of the primary material to create a digital archive of the event, yet I am collecting materials related to Progressive Reformers of Philadelphia with Omeka that I can link to my final project.

I am imagining creating a series of multimedia images and possibly animations (potentially posted to a blog, as this will not require that I pay for hosting) that could serve as a teaching tool for students. The subject matter will revolve around the Civic Club’s campaign of 1895, but will try to connect the narrative with other event, people and places.  

What is Digital History?

Digital history is a tricky thing to define. My familiarity with the field (is it a field?) is minimal at best. The collaborative, interdisciplinary and experimental aspects of digital history projects sets them apart from traditional work in the humanities. Any definition that focuses on qualifiers may unintentionally undermine the non-traditional aspects of any given project. Lisa Spiro’s “ ‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities” approached this dilemma directly and promoted a set of values that focus on communication and community rather than arguing whether projects are in the club or out. Along similar lines, I prefer a definition of digital history that is as open and inclusive as possible and have settled on this:

Digital history is the practice of using digital tools and technologies with the intentions of contributing to historical scholarship.

(The limited varieties of words that definitions of digital history typically entail lead me to believe that this definition already exists in the ether. My apologies to whomever I have plagiarized.)

Because digital history can encompass a wide variety of projects, an open definition allows a focus on the quality of a project in terms the project’s goals and intentions. Digital archives and databases may primarily be research tools, the choices from which materials get digitized to what tags documents receive involves a level of interpretive decision making. The educational website Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History may not be as design-centered, flashy, and academic as more recent projects, yet it’s content encourages the promotion of historical thinking and insight into what historians do for a school age population.

The Spatial History Project is a section of Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and uses visualizations and mapping technology to approach research questions that pertain to spatial history. The projects vary in themes, from the community based “Rebooting History” documenting urban change to the expansive information mapping of “Shaping the West.” These projects are a result of collaboration between academic researchers, primarily professors and graduate students, and the staff at the Spatial History Project. The mesmerizing visualizations undoubtedly belong within the literature of the topic they cover, as well as within the more sweeping information field in which they reside on the web.

The open source, interdisciplinary journal Southern Spaces presents history in the form of traditional articles, alongside photo essays, videos footage, and lectures, while promoting more experimental entries, such as the types of spatial histories found at the Spatial History Project. Digital history may or may not develop into its own field in twenty years, yet the practices of its proponents are making an impact on the way people process information and the distribution of scholarship.