After reading “Beyond the Vale,” a data visualization project-thesis by Marissa Kinsey, I can make a few comments about how form of the academic project impacts the audience it serves and its meaning. Focusing on a rural farming community (Gooding Township) in antebellum North Carolina, it is designed to address basic questions she had about the county’s slavery system and enslaved population. This information will prove helpful in contextualizing historical events, and in her research to study long-term trends. She wants to emphasize that it balances a “otherwise biased narrative.”

While I am certain about her intent, she raises, in many instances, more questions than she is able to answer with the scarcity of detailed information about her subjects, even in her presentation of charts, graphs, and other visuals used to argue her points. It is a work in progress she claims and was not without its mediums’ ease of use (Google Sheets) and also its complexity and difficulty of use (Gephi), which she records as having a very difficult learning curve. As she points out, while the tables are useful for organizing information or comparing very limited data, other visualizations, such as maps, graphs, charts, and webs are designed to examine a few data sets as a whole, but she was not able to obtain the desired results, due to the learning curve of the software, and also due to the very  limited data she was able to locate-and this was time consuming and mostly limited to the 1860 Federal census.

I believe she has to expand her research to include a wider study of the entire population and community history at large, and then pinpoint areas which lend authenticity to her research, and not try to use limited information to support her predetermined foregone conclusion. I think the purpose of research is to inform our decisions, and it does not necessarily support the conclusions we hope for it to-this is one result of research. But, her research, possibly does raise some very interesting questions, but her narrative may have to be adapted to fit the points she has facts for. Perhaps it is a large task for a thesis, also.

The “story” behind the data she presents does not seem entirely supported because her information does not appear to be reliable, although many of the issues and points she raises, as she realizes, lead to more questions, and may point to a needed analysis and improvement of the system so that important historical information may be analyzed with verifiable reliable results-and that is the job of the researcher, instead of filling in the blanks. I do not think her thesis was supported by these visualizations, but rather it caused me to question whether any of it was true. She seeks to make her presentation of information accessible and engaging to the exclusion of material facts, and while her use of visualization tools seems appropriate to the task as support, other documentation and proofs, more background and history, and a wider consideration of the set/subset she considers would be necessary for me to be convinced. If she is going to use this data to make her point, it needs to be more transparent, she needs to research more thoroughly to convince an audience of its veracity and not point to the scarcity of data used or the difficulty of the software required, and then rely on it. If the information isn’t sufficient, scientifically reliable and verifiable, then the claims she makes are not supported and it seems less academic or worthwhile.

Citation

Kinsey, Marissa N., “Beyond the Vale: Visualizing Slavery in Craven County, North Carolina” (2017). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2102