Categories
Module 4 Assignment Getting Data

Module 4 Getting Data

These are my very late assignments:

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1PNrtNlbPBJLB3jExpi1NUtu4IHhBefq-?usp=sharing

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/117fYoaBM6262yS2_C_cBJCR_ADdqyhlE?usp=sharing

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1vv5qEce1KAylHvAPT3fKjXZJ4L5gOUYo?usp=sharing

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1hEvgLFidjrp7nrTLeSc9MIoMwoa7T6hH?usp=sharing

I struggled to recall the prior assignments due to the gap in actually completing them. I often times would forget a space, a bracket or confuse a quote with an apostrophe. Turns out those are pretty important (who knew?). The for loops and the indenting, while also remembering the parameters of the data often got me frustrated. I’d forget how many or how much I needed and the loop would run and run and run and then I’d realize I didn’t shrink the data set.

Being able to take biographical data like gender, name and other things like that will be important to track what was coming and going from the port of New York in my own research. Seeing who was selling what to who and who was importing what for who and why will help me to tell the story of the people who made the port of New York into the economic engine it became in Early America. The gender referencing tool will be integral in my research as it will help me to show how large a role women played in the Early American economy.

I’d like to apply some of the concepts from this module to try and parse this data to see what references women in general, or prominent businesswomen in particular. I hope to see if there is a name that comes up often, or perhaps a group of names that always appear together.

One reply on “Module 4 Getting Data”

Notebooks look good.

The Gelston papers would be very difficult to programmatically grab data from, because even though they’ve got all the images posted online, there’s no digitized text associated with those images (ie, if you go through to one of the correspondence collections, you can look at the image of the handwritten image with your human eyeballs, but there’s no text on the page to copy/paste and put elsewhere, which is essentially what webscraping does.) That said, the Gelston papers do look like a great source for your diss, but you’d have to do a lot of manual transcription to do digital analysis with them. Some of the American Philosophical Society data or George Washington’s financial papers might be of interest as already-digitized alternatives. Washington’s shipping invoices and a brickmaker’s accounts are also available.

Comments are closed.