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.  

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)