In her essay “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” Johanna Drucker writes:
“the rendering of statistical information into graphical form gives it a simplicity and legibility that hides every aspect of the original interpretative framework on which the statistical data were constructed. The graphical force conceals what the statistician knows very well — that no “data” pre-exist their parameterization. Data are capta, taken not given, constructed as an interpretation of the phenomenal world, not inherent in it.”
This is to say, when data is presented, raw data loses something in being interpreted. No interpretation is without bias, and they all simplify what was originally there for the sake of legibility.
Using “Storymaps” showed that when data was assembled for easy access, a lot of information was lost. I used the sites of death of the 40 martyrs of England and Wales for my presentation, which can be viewed here: StoryMap. I was familiar with this dataset because I used it for my undergraduate thesis. However, if I was not familiar, the maps I made would have been less meaningful. As Richard White writes, creating these maps is a “means of doing research” – they were not inherently useful without the interpretation needed to make sense of them.
The maps also didn’t clarify some parts of the data, which needed to be specified elsewhere. For example, I had to add a paragraph about the nature of the dataset, and how the prevalence of priests in the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales shows that it is not a representative sample.
I ran into a few issues when uploading the data. For example, at first the file I was using didn’t have the names of the columns at the top. This meant ArcGis was unable to read it. Even once I was able to upload the file, for some reason the names had question marks in them. I was unable to fix this problem.
Adding in the monarchs as an attribute came with a problem; some sites had multiple monarchs, but only one is visible. For example, at Tyburn, people died there at every monarch, but the color is just orange for James I. It is unclear why, considering James was not the first nor the most prolific monarch. I also couldn’t add the actual date of death into the arcgis function, due to there being too many dates, and so had to simplify by sorting by monarch.
Although Richard Reynolds was killed in 1535, under Henry VIII, his data point is marked orange for James I due to many people dying at Tyburn.
On its own, these maps are interesting, but background knowledge is needed to interpret them in a sensible way. For example, my research covered Elizabeth specifically, so I was not surprised that she oversaw more executions than any other monarch. I knew that she specifically targeted priests, who were more likely to be canonized, while other monarchs focused more on taxing Catholic laypeople.
Elizabeth I oversaw half of the martyrdoms canonized by the Catholic Church.
This was a very interesting experience, and I was glad to be able to use these programs. A large part of my job as a research assistant is to represent knowledge in an understandable way, while noting the data losses that occur in this process.
Works Cited
Catholic Forum. “Patron Saints Index Definition: Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.” Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20130313083422/http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/martyr02.htm. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 005, no. 1, Mar. 2011.
White, Richard. “What Is Spatial History?” 1 February 2010, http://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
StoryMap Link: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a73d9ad02a154f0a907d07aafc7a2d80
