By Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 5:50pm:
- Complete Reading:
- William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, “The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities.”
- Also:
- Review the comments we left on your group’s post sharing the secondary sources you’ve identified (we will comment by noon on Tuesday). Someone from each group must respond to our feedback by class time on Wednesday.
- Establish a strategy within your group for digesting the secondary sources you’ve located. This should be the beginning of your background reading, which should NOT be limited to what you’ve selected here. Be prepared to present this strategy to the class on Wednesday.
Group Projects:
- Secondary source: a book or article
- Sharing workload
- Will focus on group projects on Wednesday
Guest Speaker:
Prof. John Maciuika, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History, Baruch College.
Reading Review:
Richard White, “What is Spatial History?” Spatial History Lab: Working paper; Submitted February 1, 2010.
- The Spatial Turn
- Collaborative process of creating “visualizations”
- “Space itself is historical” [it is something that humans produce over time, especially through movement]
- Relation of representational space to actual space — can be revealed through layering of data
- Representations of space and representational space
- Mapping as a tool for *doing research,* not just communicating information
In order to mine relevant data for an issue such as the War on Drugs effectively during the 2012 Presidential Election, Contra as a team must first understand what we are looking for. The current theme as we are proceeding with is a bit too vast and overwhelming tapping into all aspects of government. Although during the debates, there won’t be much mention of the War on Drugs we can focus on policies supported as well as prior speeches. It would be vital to focus on keywords and build upon the candidate’s position on the current drug problems. What is not said will be just as important in our research in an attempt to fully understand where the candidates stand.
With this information, we can relate it with the context of their respective parties and through qualitative research of history, we can project and imagine how the War on Drugs will unfold in the near or distant future. It is an absolute necessity to find and choose authentic sources of information in order to successfully paint a slight picture of our task at hand. Upon sifting through all of these sources, we can attempt to answer the question we are proposed.
It seems like a very complicated move; the transformation and innovation to the internet and its progressive data bases. However, it could be simply explained by looking at the transformation our world has gone through, is going through, and try to plan and predict future transformations. The technological advances that we have gone through are sometimes taken for granted or sometimes not even noticed, but thats not the point i am trying to make. The point i am trying to make is that technological innovations drive our world and more specifically our daily lives. As you can see from the reading more and more; people are working on moving their work online. The benefit of it being online is far beyond anyone could have ever imagined. Having your work online means that everyone across the world can access it, thus people can help with their input and corrections/additions. Also it means that it will never decease, once its online, especially in multiple places it is practically impossible for it to just disappear. Of course there are down sides to it being online as well.
My group picked a few topics to focus on, one of them is the affect of the internet and its tools like twitter, Facebook, and other social websites have of presidential elections. We could show different statues from various people like the presidents themselves, vice presidents, and from educated people and see how the discussion on the posts develops in favor of the candidate. Also since most younger people use these social websites you can target them on those websites and educate them about the elections. Danny Hayes points out that the way the candidates are portrayed via the social media affects whether people vote for them. He also shows that the way things are phrased make a difference to the public. This mainly has to do with younger people that use the internet, by younger people i mean the generation that actually uses the internet. As the internet became the primary source (in the sense of the main source) people get their information from it also divides the voters since some actually do not use the internet, which is perfectly fine as long as its a credible source and you double check the information portrayed to you from the TV, Newspaper, or radio.
With all the debates that the presidential candidates do before the election, usually, it ends up that there is just too much data for any one person to process and analyze. In order for our group, Contra, to attempt to answer the correlation with the War on Drugs and Presidential Elections, we would seek to use data mining software to weed out information that is not pertinent to our project when we analyze presidential debates.
As the War on Drugs is not a widely talked about topic for presidential elections, the use of data mining softwares will be beneficial in helping us find out exactly how often phrases such as “drugs”, “cartels”, “anti-(fill in whatever drug)” come up during the debates. Then we would use this information to come to a conclusion on how much emphasis is put on the War on Drugs during the presidential elections and hopefully we can answer some of the questions that our group posed for our project.
Secondary Sources for Group 1:
1.) PRESIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION
This document goes in to great detail how the Internet has become a factor during Clinton’s Presidency and how Bush Jr was the first president to establish a Twitter account and the significance of how social media and the Internet became an integral part of the election process from that point.
2.) Does the Messenger Matter? Candidate-Media Agenda Convergence and Its Effects on Voter
By using data during the early stages of the 2006 Texas midterm election, Danny Hayes show how media coverage of candidates affects the willingness for voters to vote for them. The findings in Hayes pieces show the value for candidates of enlisting new media to help pass along their message and to strengthen their influence as a political candiate.
In this piece, the authors discuss how the internet divides voters. The piece talks about how just like the elderly, those less well educated, and some minorities are less likely to use the Internet than other Americans, candidates for lower-level offices are less likely to use it than presidential and congressional candidates.
How could your group use text mining to answer the historical question(s) you’ve proposed thus far?
Our group could use text mining to answer the historical questions we had proposed by narrowing down keys word, sort different type of document, seek out specifics information, and determine correlation between different documents.
First off, our group could start text mining for keys words from website or blog through wordle.com. Then, we can create a list of words that appear the most. Following that, we can theorize the relationship between the words and find out why it appears. The finding might surprise us and guide us in a different direction.
Second, we can sort out documents that are irrelevant to our research because through the general search, when we enter the war on drugs in a normal search engine, we can get ton of results. Out of all the result we get back from a regular search engine, we could get tons of unrelated hits to our topics. So by using text mining, we can sort out the irrelevant information and go to more the specifics of our search.
Finally, with text mining we can figure out the relationship between documents that might not be present in the document itself. For example, an article or report writing in 2012 might has something do with a document in the 1960s.
In conclusion, text mining is extremely useful tool to use for research and to get A in digital history class at Baruch.
Text mining will be an essential component in visualizing the answers to the questions Contra will present. Since presedential debate transcripts are so widely available, we can use data mining to specifically find out how many times, The War on Drugs was mentioned by the candidates. This can give us a statistical basis to comparatively look at the funding that was pumped into the war on drugs in the subsequent presedential term. In this current election we see this domestic war scarcely being mentioned if at all by both candidates. I hypothesize that a correlation could emerge showing that the war continues to have an increase in funding, while it being less of a platform for campaigns to run on. Highlighting this information will open up further questions, such as; why? We could also illustrate on whether or not states support an increase, or decrease in budget within this war. This can be done by seeking out secondary sources in which different representatives give their personal opinion on the campaign.
Being in the midst of the debates, as we are today, it would be hard to read through any newspaper or watch the nightly news without hearing of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates. Pundits and analysts are quick to jump on every word, interruption, and perceived mistake in order to determine who “won.” With this in mind, our group The Instigators, aim to analyze all possible information in order to see if the debates truly make a difference. Many believe that at this point in the campaign cycle, most voters have already decided well in advance who they plan on voting for; however, for those still on the fence, could the debates truly sway them in either direction?
Given these circumstances, data mining will serve as an invaluable tool in the examination of the countless information released in response to the debates. Finding the correlations between live-real-time reactions from online sources such as Twitter, Facebook, and various RSS feeds, will shed light on the question of voter-impact. It is imperative to approach this question on importance of the debates from many different angles, in order to provide a more nuanced response to a complex question. While many individual sources will claim to provide their own idea of the “winner” of each debate, the general data that will be received by our group may in fact not be as simple as yes/no, Democrat/Republican.
As a sub-focus, it may also be important to mine data regarding third party candidates and their lack of inclusion in all of the debates.
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