Outline– My final project will trace the development of the labor force of the American whaling industry over the nineteenth century. Using the New Bedford whaling crew list database as a data set and the use of network analysis and mapping this project reveals the racial and geographic makeup of the whaling crews. There has been previous research revealing the cosmopolitan makeup of the New Bedford crews, by mapping residency, skin color, rank and other metrics this anecdotal evidence will become visually apparent. Further, running a network analysis upon a select number of ships and filtering by race and residency, patterns of the crew makeups become apparent. Mapping residency onto a globe will display the specific hubs form which American whale men came from. While a network analysis of a collection of select voyages will trace the unique stories of specific crews. The whalers who sailed from New Bedford are incredibly diverse, and many crews display specific makeups. This project will attempt to verify previously known crew patterns as well as reveal others.

Data Critique

The two datasets I will be using for this project are rosters from the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball five years after integration. The datasets primarily come from information from websites associated with sports reference. I was able to create datasets using this information to include information like the name of the player, age of the player, where they are from, what team they played on, and most importantly for this project their race. This includes data for each team from each league. As this dataset was made by me, I’m still considering adding more data if I find something else I want to explore with this project.

RUSCORP is a database of corporations in the Russian Empire founded between 1700 and 1913. The project of Thomas C. Owen at Louisiana State University, the data was compiled through the analysis of corporate charters granted by the Russian government from the time of Peter the Great until the outbreak of World War I and subsequent collapse of the Russian Empire. The database is composed of fifty-two machine-readable text files, divided into six separate file categories analyzing 4,539 corporations, 14,245 founders, and 5,243 managers. This information documents the rise of capitalism in Tsarist Russia, tracking its progress through Russia’s industrialization in the late 19^th century and the demise of the empire in the early 20^th century.

My data set is composed of entries pulled from the Digital Public Library of America relating to the search term “Adirondacks.” Each row contains the link to an image, what organization contributed the image, the subject of the image, the image’s original creator, the medium, and a description of the image’s content. Not every entry contains all of this information. The images come from many sources, but the majority of the content comes from the Adirondack Museum and the New York Public Library.