The data set from Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania available from the American Philosophical Society Library contains information retrieved from the admissions ledgers for prisoners admitted to the penitentiary between April 24, 1830 and May 24, 1843. The collection description from the American Philosophical Society Library indicates that the records from which this data set are derived were recorded upon a prisoner’s admission into ESP.

This data set contains detailed information on objects in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology online collections. The orginial data set contained over 12,500 objects from the early modern period, for the purpose of this critique assignment appromixately 770 objects from the data set were anaylized using WTFcsv.

The data set we analyzed was that of the Eastern State Penitentiary admission books. The books listed the admission of the incoming prisoners by name and other features such as their age, ethnicity, religion, job, birth place, prisoner number, admission date, sentencing location, offense, length of sentence, number of convictions and general notes. The data describes the inmates imprisoned at Eastern State Penitentiary from the years 1832- 1868. While the data was collected in one specific region the original homelands of the inmates covers a large geographic area demonstrating the changing demographic in the industrial age. For example, imprisoned are not only people from the local area, but from countries such as Holland, Germany and Ireland. The data provided lacks much of the context needed to understand the sentencing procedure. Some were sentenced to a year for forgery, while another was sentenced to 10 years for the same offence, likewise others who committed a seemingly minor offence were given more time than those who committed murder.

by Tyson Luneau and Kristian Price

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages Database includes records of 36,002 voyages which engaged in the sale and purchase of African slaves. The recorded voyages in the database begin as early as 1514, with the last voyage occurring in 1866. There is no one distinctive, geographic pattern of these voyages, with ships traveling between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, occasionally not traveling between continents but rather from colony to colony, avoiding the middle passage altogether. Some of the voyages identified did not even contain slaves on the ship, as the captain and crew simply returned to their original ports. While some of these instances could be considered statistical outliers, it nonetheless reflects the diversity of data within the dataset.