Palladio – History View

How do I feel about the Digital History class at the end? Simultaneously exhausted, relieved, and sad it’s over. Packing 16 weeks of material and absorption into 5 weeks was a challenge, for the teacher as well as the students.

I imagine many of the improvements I would suggest are mostly addressed by just having more time available to try out the software applications, and work on the projects. It would have been nice to have had time in a class working session to practice with WordPress blog posts and media uploads. The projects we did and looked at required some time for reflection. In the five-week format, there just wasn’t much if there was any time for that.

Nonetheless, the class ended with a bang! Our last assignment was to listen to the podcast(s) that interested us from the Tattooed Historian and then write a blog post about our opinion of the efficacy of the digital humanities. I listened to his introductory podcast, and then one he did with Professor Walters, both very informative and worth a listen. See http://thetattooedhistorian.libsyn.com/

Since he lives nearby in Pennsylvania and as a favor to his friend Professor Walters, the Tattooed Historian came down and engaged the class in 2 hours of an interesting dialogue on how one goes about being a cutting-edge digital historian without a Ph.D. Yes. The Tattooed Historian really is tattooed. He has a lot of them, 35 I think, and all of them related to some aspect of his interest in history. One fascinating tidbit was the revelation that he had traveled to St. Louis to find the descendent tattoo shop of the tattoo artist that had tattooed approximately ten thousand soldiers during World War II and then had himself decorated with one of that artist classic designs. The shop still had World War II tattoo patterns even though they didn’t get many requests.

On a side note, I was surprised that many soldiers got tattoos in World war II. During my Vietnam service in the Marine Corps, we were threatened with court-martials if we got a tattoo. So, most didn’t. The Marine Corps logic was that too many tattoo recipients got hepatitis along with the tattoo from the needles and with a resultant weakening in unit end strength.

But I digress. The Tattooed Historian told us that his mission and business model lies in providing an outlet and legitimacy to those who want to pursue history, or research and write history without having to get a Ph.D. or necessarily have history as their primary focus or educational background. He is not suggesting that the History Ph.D. is not of value, just that history can be successfully made without one. And this is where my opinion on the digital humanities comes in. The information revolution, the internet, networked applications, the fall in the cost and the expansion of the availability of digital storage and network access, all have enabled the democratization of history and the broader humanities. Digital archives, laptop and handheld computers, audio, video production, and language translation capabilities have given research and production tools to the masses.

In my own experience, I took a lot of graduate history courses at Catholic University, but I only heard of Christopher Dawson, the first historian who held the Catholic History Chair at Harvard University, and a historian of the western civilization who rivals Toynbee and Quigley, because of Twitter. Another aside, Harvard had to pay to move Dawson’s book and manuscripts collection to Massachusetts from England, Dawson was a Brit, because Dawson’s personal collection of ancient sources was so superior or unique that Harvard’s collection didn’t measure up. Similarly, my American Government Masters was heavy in political philosophy, but again it was Twitter, Facebook, and new translation capabilities that exposed me to the Italian political philosopher, Augusto Del Noce, and the French political philosopher, Simone Weil. Their arguments on the post-World War II course of the humanities make the culture wars of the current day make sense. My own experience has given me an example of the democratization of the humanities and history.

The StoryMap, the Omeka exhibit, the Palladio network analysis that we did as projects in this class were all enabled by the internet, and by my picture taking capability in my cell phone. Many of the images I used or the Palladio dataset I put together were first taken by the camera in my cell phone. I found it interesting that the only items the Tattooed Historian has beyond what I have in digital capability with my laptop and cell phone and installed applications is a small investment in an audio device, microphones, an Adobe audio manager, and a tripod. Technology has enabled the democratization of history, and the humanities we can all access items that were only available to an elite before the internet, and we can all write and publish to a global audience our various histories. The price, though, as with all democratizations will be the need to assess authenticity, a point of the Tattooed Historian, and as one ABD historian once told me, accuracy, the mark of the historian is accuracy.

For Thursday, Professor Walters has us using open source network analysis tools and using one, Palladio, a Stanford University product, on a project of ours. The project I’m using is an aspect of the book I’ve been working on and addressing a question therein.

For a good part of my adult life, I’ve been slowly working on a biography and publication of the letters of Captain Edward Patrick Brownson (1843-1864) At 20 years of age, Captain Brownson was mortally wounded while leading a counterattack of the 12th New Jersey at the Second Battle of Ream’s Station, Virginia. That battle was a defeat for the Union and came at the nadir of Union fortunes in the Civil War. Since May 1864, Grant had taken massive casualties in the Overland Campaign and was stalemated outside Petersburg. Sherman had so far failed to take Atlanta. Lincoln planned on not being re-elected.

In reviewing the loss at Reams Station, one is struck by the blame placed in the official reports and unit histories on bounty men and foreign conscripts, mostly Germans for the loss. At the culminating point in the final mass attack by the Confederates, Union units that contained bounty and foreign troops broke which led to 140 killed, 529 wounded, and 2073 captured or missing Union soldiers (See Official Records XLII, Part1, Pg129-133, Table1). When I doing research in the National Archives as part of was studying the battle in a military geography course recently, I came across the Confederate list of Union enlisted prisoners captured at Reams Station. The Confederates recorded name, rank, unit, and significantly for this discussion, the place of birth of the Union enlisted prisoners. The list contains xxx names. So far, I’ve transcribed about 310 of them. Even though not complete, I’ve used the list to see how the place of birth related to the units captured. Does the network analysis support the official reports that the Germans were basically responsible for the loss?

To be able to use the Confederate list of Union prisoners in Palladio, I’ve used the Excel spreadsheet that has the 310 transcribed so far and added to the list the geographic coordinates at the country level of where the prisoner was born, and where the regiment the prisoner was part of was formed. To the record, I added the brigade and division membership of the regiment. The Division and brigade are significant because although the 1st Division troops broke and enabled the Confederates to break into the Union fortification, it was the lackluster performance of 2nd Division troops that is blamed for allowing the Confederate to exploit the breakthrough.

After putting the data into Palladio, I first mapped the prisoners by where they were born. See Figure 1. At 203, there are far more prisoners born in the USA than anywhere else. There are only 25 Germans (25), and the Irish at 49 are the next largest group after those born in the USA. A caveat, this is still a partial data set, and the randomness of it is unknown. It may be a skewed sample and not representative of the full list of prisoners. But if it is at all representative, then it doesn’t begin to support the idea that the loss was due to the Germans. The size of the rest of the Foreign-born soldiers, although interesting as to location, Chile, Russia, etc., is not large enough even in aggregate to impact the course of the battle.

Another visualization from Palladio maps the number of captured soldiers by the State Regiment they were from. I added the Regiment’s Brigade and Division assignment. See Figure 2. In Figure 2, the 36th Wisconsin from the 1st Division has the largest number captured by a factor of 2. The next largest in order are all from the 2nd Division, the 164th NY, 8th NY, and 20th MA (the Harvard Regiment. This leads one to ask what was the composition of the Foreign-born by Division.

Figure 2: Union Regiments Captured at Reams Station

Figure 3 shows the contribution of the Foreign-born to Division in a network graph. What immediately stands out is the smaller number of 1st Division soldiers captured. The graph also shows that some countries are unique to Division, for example, Chile and Switzerland are only found in the 1st Division while Norway and others are found only in the 2nd Division. The 2nd Division has more Foreign-born than the 1st Division. However, the largest number of Foreign-born, the Irish and the Germans contribute to both Divisions. The birthplace contribution and uniqueness by Division is perhaps more easily seen in a table distribution, which is shown in Table 1 below.

Figure 3: Birthplace contribution by Division of captured Union Prisoners

Table 1: Foreign-Born Contribution by Division

In summary, the preceding visualizations from Palladio assuming the representativeness of the sample shows that the contribution of the Foreign-born to the Union loss at Reams Station in 1864 was not significant. In other words, the Foreign-born were probably used as scapegoats for the failure. An easy explanation. Other factors, heat exhaustion, poor placement of units within an inadequate fortification, a limited number of artillery units along due to muddy roads, and ultimately poor decision-making on the part of the Commanders who got to write the report. This type of analysis can be used to create views that are harder to see when just crunching numbers or reading tables. If one could geocode the placement of the units within the Reams Station fortification, and add that to the existing table a more complete insight could be drawn on the Foreign-born contribution or lack thereof, to the Union debacle at Reams Station.

Tag: Palladio

End of the Semester

Second Reams Station: Did the German troops really lose it?