1. “Excel is for student grades right?”
Digital Humanities In Practice: An Exploration
Ian Toller-Clark Doctoral Candidate History Department UIUC
Background
My research most broadly focuses on how local partisan politics and political economy transformed the United States. For my dissertation I examine how the local politics and political economy of Wisconsin influenced the rise of the modern conservative movement. To answer this question I am researching the politicization of issues including welfare, comparable worth, and prison construction within the context of the deindustrializating Midwest. Digital humanities provides a methodological tool for analyzing the electoral, demographic, and economic data that I am collecting for my dissertation.
“Excel is for student grades right?”
Using Excel!
I am new to coding quantitative data. As a historian I analyze qualitative data such as correspondence, memos, and newspapers articles. When I use quantitative data, it is from secondary sources that have already completed the analysis. As a consequence, I was unfamiliar with how to create my own quanitative data set and manipulate the data. This course provided that opportunity to think about how to create my own data sets and manipulate that data.
For the semester length project I decided to learn how to use Excel to analyze electoral data for the election of 1972 in Wisconsin. The overall research question was how did support for George Wallace during Wisconsin ‘72 primary compare to the support of American Party candidates in local races during the ‘72 general election?
Initial Plan
Data, Data, Data!
My initial plan had been to take the sources I had collected (mostly correspondence, and newspaper articles) and turn them into a searchable digital databse for myself. My hope was that I could make it easier to find quotes and I could provide a quantitative measurement of the issues that mattered most to politicians and their constituents. This in particular is a contribution I hope to make with my dissertation to the field of digital humanities. To begin this endeavor I learned how to use Abbyy Finereader to scan my documents. In addition, I learned how to use python and Excel which will eventually allow me to complete the quantitative analysis.
Unfortunately this proved to be a much longer than anticipated endeavor. The election data for the years I work with from 1946 through 1988 are in the Wisconsin Blue Book, which I can download from the Wisconsin Legislature Bureau website. However, the PDFs I downloaded needed to first be converted to readable files, which I did through Abbyy Finereader. I converted the data into text files which I then cleaned with TextWrangler and then I uploaded to Excel. While I haven’t produced data yet, I have learned the tools which will be extremely valuable as I move further into my dissertation research and writing.
Acknowledgments: This work was part of a Focal Point grant funded by the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Also I would like to thank (in no particular order): Jennifer Jones, Halie Rando, Diana Byrne, Professor Ayla Stein, Professor Heidi Imker, and
the entire class of Info-500.