Describing History with Data in the Digital Humanities Using - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Describing History with Data in the Digital Humanities

Using Register of Chinese Immigrants to Canada, 1886-1949 For Pixelating, UBC

Sarah Zhang April 26, 2018

Background

• The head tax imposed by the Canadian Government
• n Chinese Immigrants between 1885 to 1923
• The register presents an irony: rich data
• Transformation of the print register to a digital

spreadsheet, 2005-2007

• Normalization of transliterations of the immigrants’
• rigins, 2008-2010, led by UBC’s Asian Library

The dataset on Open Collection

Normalization of transliteration of

• rigins-The groundwork

Source: Chiang, R., 2016

At level of county: At level of village/town:

The normalized village name-恒美 （code 3793 ) and the corresponding recorded names-codes

Digging at the level of county for immigrants’ wellbeing

Source: Ward, 2013

Mean Height by Age, contrasting 5 birth year cohort.

(n=11,839) for immigrants from Xinhui

Digging at the level of village/town for migration pattern

Workflow-Producing the visualization of village-destination connection for Zhongshan county, using Palladio

• Understanding the data- the challenge posed by the lack of

codebook

• Data cleaning
• Convert the dataset to .csv file
• Drag and drop to Palladio
• Switch to the tab “Graph”, select a variable for “source” and a

variable for “target”

• Make the spots weighted
• Explore!

Combining with other methods: aggregated statistical and data visualization

Conclusion

• Normalization of village/town names is valuable-

allows research at all level of granularity.

• More nuanced trends in the immigrants’ wellbeing

and migration patterns uncovered.

• This is just beginning…

Reference

Chiang， R.（2016). Canada Immigration Chinese Head Tax Record Sun Woy District. ISSCO 2016: 9th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas Ward, W . P. (2013;2012). Stature, migration and human welfare in south china, 1850-1930.Economics and Human Biology, 11(4), 488. doi:10.1016/j.ehb.2012.10.003 Yu, H., Chan, S. (2017). The Cantonese Pacific: Migration Networks and Mobility Across Space and Time. In Wong, L. L. (ed.). Trans-pacific mobilities: The chinese and canada. Vancouver;Toronto;: UBC Press.

Let’s play with Palladio!

• http://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/
• Download the sample data:

Steps

• Click “Start”
• Copy and paste your data, or upload a .csv file
• Edit attributes
• Open the Graph tool
• Specify source and target nodes
• Size nodes, highlight nodes
• Add a filter
• Try two-mode network: choose a temporal variable for source

Want to learn more about Palladio?

From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources By Marten Düring