Flourish was my biggest enemy this term (that I was likely to contend with in the future), so I elected to go back in and make a new Flourish datamap with information from World Population Review. I feel like this one was more of a combination of information from week 6 and week 8 because I found information regarding the population of Indigenous people in the United States in the modern era, which I thought was an interesting thing to look at in terms of how many Indigenous people were counted per state in the World Population Review and in what states they were located. I was able to make it demonstrate by state how many people there were, but I was unable to find a way to indicate the percentage of Indigenous people of the total population of a state – because, for example, Alaska has the greatest concentration of Indigenous people in its state, but California has the greatest number of Indigenous people in its state. So, even though California is the darkest state on the map, in terms of population make-up it doesn’t have the greatest concentration of population, thus I wish I could think of a way to make that clearer in my datamap. I also wish Flourish had more continental US options other than state, county, and hexagon because I just have a great dislike for maps like that, but the data I have also isn’t specific enough that I could make a bubble map or something like that to indicate where exactly in each state are the Indigenous people and what does that look like in comparison to the rest of the state.
If I could make this map exactly the way I want it to look, I would be able to have a tab that shows number of Indigenous people in each state, that information in comparison to the total population of the state, and it would be in some format other than states as a whole because I personally find datamaps like that deceptive. Traditionally, datamaps are used to represent data tied to the land – such as election information, political aligments, that kind of thing. With Flourish, datamaps are just one of the many things that can be created based off of an available dataset. I have, historically, found Flourish very frustrating because it’s a lot of pushing buttons and trying to outsmart the software in order to get it to do what I want it to do. So, while I think Flourish is an excellent tool for digital humanities, the users just have to work past the ‘pull your hair out’ rage before it starts to do really cool things.
In terms of my digital humanities portfolio as a whole, this was certainly one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever taken, and that contained a lot of brain exercising I had to do. Because so many history classes tend to just exist in writing papers, having discussions, maybe make a presentation, this class pushed me to use parts of my brain that had ‘atrophied’ essentially. In other classes (or even in high school), the movement to the digital world was something discussed so often and with such frequency that students were provided with endless chances to work with new digital tools that challenged them and made them work through problems that they encountered. Writing papers and presentations do come with their own challenges, but they generally don’t require me to call my sibling at 11pm and ask them questions about the comprehensibility of my datamap, or if my thought process is clear through the points I’ve put on the map and the information going along with it. This class was to my history brain as playing the piano is to my music brain; it required me to get creative and think outside the box to try to solve problems I either had never encountered or hadn’t encountered in a long time.
In terms of how this class might ripple into different parts of my life, I have a feeling it’s going to be a massive part of my academic and work future. Not only because digital humanities and public history are springing up and gaining traction as fields, but because that’s where we’re moving to as society in its entirety. I’m employed already in the Knox Abolition Lab as an assistant (where we work with tools like Flourish all the time), but being tech-savvy is so important these days, so taking this class really worked my tech-brain muscles in the best ways possible. In a non-digital aspect, I can see this class working its way into how I handle and interact with things of an Indigenous nature and utilizing a critical lens in everyday life and in my academic life when looking at different texts, interactions, or why things are the way they are. As we’ve discussed in class, Indigenous people are present in this world and they’re going to continue to be present in this world, and it’s part of my job as a historian of any kind to seek knowledge in a healthy and respectful manner, and this class is a crash-course in working as a historian in that capacity because it circumvents traditional aspects of historianship that are lauded as necessary to be successful. Along with that, there are new avenues of history being paved all the time, with some of the coolest (in my opinion) being social histories and material histories. Historian is always spoken of in this abstract that focuses on battles, kings, queens – essentially money and politics. That style of history, though, leaves out crucial parts of history in every capacity that shaped the progression of time and events as a whole. It’s relatively common for people to look at the French Revolution and say “I don’t know how they got there,” which does them a disservice. Once you know about the events and experiences of the common-folk leading up to the French Revolution, it makes so much more sense why they went off the handle – but people don’t learn those things just by looking at the kings and the monarchies that ruled. So much of history is people-led, but we keep focusing on the person. So not only do I think the way we look at history need to change, but digital humanities is an excellent way to get started on that change because it forces people to leave their prejudices and prior beliefs at the door and come in ready to learn and be challenged.
