I have two related projects — here’s the first one.

France's most profitable plantation colony in the 1700s

I want to propose a help-a-thon for a project I’m calling Virtual Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue was the French colony that became Haiti in 1804 after the only successful slave uprising in world history. In the second half of the 1700s French administrators compiled an extraordinary collection of census data for the colony. About a dozen censuses recorded data for each of approximately 30 colonial parishes, giving numbers of white colonists, free people of color, enslaved workers and breaking these categories down by age and gender.  There are also parish-level tallies for commodity and food crops, munitions, weapons and animals. I’ve already made substantial progress towards this project, first on proprietary software (ArcGIS) and now on open source QGIS. I can already create choropleth maps of the census data for Saint-Domingue in ArcGIS and I’m working on reaching the same level in QGIS.

My goal is  to put this data on the web in a dynamic format, so that users can chose the different formats themselves and get a display on the screen. This is an amazing source for understanding what was happening on the eve of the world’s only successful slave uprising. It could also be very useful for writing an environmental history of Haiti, something that is sorely lacking.  I want something that would be accessible to undergraduates as well as researchers. So I also want to make the data available in spreadsheet form so that other researchers can check it.

Finally I’d like to leave the door open to add other kinds of data to this project. For example, I’d like it to be open so that colleagues could add coordinates of plantation ruins in modern-day Haiti,  overlays of historical maps that show locations of plantations, irrigation works, plantation illustrations, other material. There is also an amazing textual source — a highly detailed parish-by-parish overview of the colony written in 1788 just before the Haitian Revolution. A colleague has a spreadsheet showing slave populations on hundreds of individual plantations. I’d like to be able to integrate that as well in the future, if he is interested. And there is also the slave trade data from slavevoyages.com

I’m currently working on a project that applies different kinds of digital analysis to a large corpus of nineteenth-century poetry texts.  One of the things I’m exploring are the strengths and limitations for poetic analysis of existing tools that are typically used with prose texts.  For instance, word frequency and word clustering can tell us certain things about poetic texts as they do with prose texts.  But there are other features of poetic language (like rhyme, line length, and punctuation) that are meaningful and thus require different tools.

I’d love the chance to brainstorm some new tools or uses of existing ones for analyzing the language of poetry with people who have different expertise than I do.  I’d also be interested in talking with other people currently working with poetic texts in any kind of DH project to share ideas, methods, problems, and so forth.

It would be interesting to hear more about memes. Unlike Adorno and other cultural theorists who are critical of popular culture as being comprised of commercial products to placate the masses, there are other theorists (for example, Douglas Kellner) who believe that individuals can play with and comment upon products of pop culture. I think I would argue that memes do just that. Although fleeting ephemera, they give voice to those who rearrange, redo, or literally comment upon the original image, song, or video. The question remains though since they are temporary and easily forgettable, can they ever have a chance of enacting any real political change?

One of the great aspects of Web 2.0 is the availability of numerous APIs that are attracting both professional and hobbyist programmers to build cool new applications. The mashup has been borrowed from Hip-Hop culture and re-envisioned as a combination services and data from multiple locations online. Do you care about the modern views by location on 17th century poetry? You can cross-reference your collection of poems with the one of the news archive APIs and visualize the results on a Google Map.

The flip side to this is that each of these APIs started with a person who saw the benefit to letting data be available and re-usable. API creation is a daunting task, but it can be made easier. The Walden’s Paths project at Texas A&M, which I am currently the lead designer on, has found that by coupling modern database access techniques and the RESTlet library for API creation, we can easily produce APIs that can be successfully used for creation of interesting interfaces.

I propose a hack-a-thon where we would discuss as a group API design, issues to be concerned of when exposing your data, and then put together simple APIs that would allow easy data access. This might be even more useful when combined with others who have knowledge of creating mashups so we can quickly see what an open-API allows us.