For my final project, I am debating between two datasets. The first one that sparked my interest was “Her Hat Was In the Ring: US Women Who Ran For Office Before 1920”. I’m interested in this mostly because of my interest in gender history. Usually, I study European gender history, but I’d be interested in broadening that horizon to give myself a more rounded understanding of gender in the modern world. My initial questions looking at this data set is; what can this tell us about women’s place in politics? Did women have a place in politics, and what kind of women were involved in politics (as it relates to race, class, etc).
My second data set is the “Whaling Crew List Database” from the Nantucket Whaling Museum. Honestly, this one sparked my interest because I very briefly studied whaling and whaling culture in an undergrad class a few years ago. I’d be interested in seeing what kind of jobs were available to different people within the whaling community, and what that meant for the community of Nantucket. However, that question is flexible, as I need to do some deeper analysis of the data to see what kind of data is actually available.
One reply on “Module 6: Breather”
Occupation is going to be pretty hard to pull out of the whaling crew database; there’s not a lot of info in that one beyond name of ship and location the sailor was from.
The Her Hat one may be a bit easier to answer the kind of questions you’re asking. There’s not a lot of other info in that besides the campaigns they ran, but if you do a bit of research to contextualize the occupation info you may be able to make some conclusions. It may be worth adding a column to categorize what kind of office they were running for (local/state/national) and see if either they tend to run for higher offices later in life, if women in certain occupations run for certain offices or levels of office, or if there’s more women running for national office closer to 1920 or something.
Aimee is also thinking about doing the Her Hat data if you’re interested in a group project https://dhpracticum21.maevekane.net/2021/03/21/module-6-final-project-dataset/