{"id":9,"date":"2022-10-30T17:20:56","date_gmt":"2022-10-30T17:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2022-10-30T21:55:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-30T21:55:50","slug":"create-your-website-with-blocks","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping Johnathon Carver&#8217;s Travels as accounted in his book &#8220;Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This project maps prominent locations mentioned in Johnathon Carver&#8217;s account of his adventures in the upper Mississippi Valley between 1766-1768. Carver was one of the first English explorers in this region prior to white settlement. His book, made up of journal entries and lengthy descriptions of the places, people and animals of the region was highly successful in the 18th century. This map identifies the locations he describes in the book, paired with his descriptions. The goal is to help paint a picture of how the Upper Mississippi River might have been perceived by White settlers prior to their arrival and further identify what places were considered important for this audience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/carleton.maps.arcgis.com\/apps\/instant\/basic\/index.html?appid=74c1508dbb754bdd9a531964ee45726d\" width=\"1300\" height=\"1000\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:0\" allowfullscreen=\"\">iFrames are not supported on this page.<\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Process:<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The map above was was created using textual analysis of the eBook published by the Project Gutenberg.Text file of Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, in the Years 1766, 1767 and 1768 by Jonathon Carver produced as an eBook by The Project Gutenberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I used <a href=\"https:\/\/recogito.pelagios.org\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/recogito.pelagios.org\/\">Recogito<\/a> to extract all of the locations Carver mentions in the text and <a href=\"https:\/\/openrefine.org\/\">Open Refine<\/a>  to clean up the place name data. I further paired latitude and longitude coordinates to the place names using the <a href=\"https:\/\/workspace.google.com\/marketplace\/app\/geocode_by_awesome_table\/904124517349\">Geocode by Awesome table plug in<\/a>. The map was created using <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arcgis.com\/index.html\">ArcGIS Online <\/a>. I began by gaining some familiarity with the source file itself. The book outlines Jonathon Carver\u2019s journey and description of the northern Mississippi valley and surrounding area. I decided to cut down the data to only include the introduction because this is where he talks the most about the places that he visited. The rest of the book is predominantly focused on descriptions of the people, animals and fauna living in the area. After trimming down the data set I uploaded the file to Recogito to identify the locations mentioned in the text. I used the Named Entity Recognition function and then went back to manually edit. This process created a csv file with a list of the locations mentioned in the text. The next step was to clean up this data in order to remove duplicates and standardize aspects such as spelling and punctuation. I used Open Refine to cluster the place names, remove whitespaces and make all the data points title case. Despite this cleaning there were still duplicates and locations in the data that were not relevant to the text. I removed these by manually combing through the data set and finding where Carver mentions them in the text. I used the Geocode plugin in Google Sheets to acquire latitude and longitude coordinates for each of the locations. There were many locations that the plugin was unable to locate correctly with the first attempt. To resolve these issues I went back into the data set and did more data cleaning, this time I consulted additional sources and often looked up the place name to try and find it myself. There were some places that I was simply unable to locate, in these cases I searched back in the text and if they were not essential to the telling of the story I took them out of the data set. In a couple instances I am sure a location could have been determined if I had more time and consulted additional sources from this time period. Eventually, I had a trimmed dataset with coordinates for each location. To supplement the map I went back into the source document to find Carver\u2019s description of the locations and included these extracts in an additional column of my dataset. I uploaded this csv file to ArcGIS Online.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Presentation:&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I used ArcGIS Online\u2019s web app feature to create a map I could embed into a webpage. I kept the web design simple in order to highlight the map product as best I could. I did this using the wordpress application and embedding the map on a page with a title and short description.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Significance:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jonathan Carver first published Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America in 1778. It paints a vivid picture of the people and places of the upper Mississippi River Valley in this time period as perceived by the English. Plotting the locations he explored alongside his descriptions on a web map help paint a picture of what the region looked like before substantial white settlement. This project brings Carver\u2019s observations into more light. Ideally, this project could serve as a jumping off point for further explorations of this expedition and how Indigenous people and places were affected by the incursion of White settlers.\u00a0This project is limited in its scope due to time and resource constraints and could benefit from an inclusion of other sources from this time to supplement Carver&#8217;s observations. Furthermore, I did not track Carver&#8217;s route on the map, the individual places are identified independently telling us more about the places themselves and less about Carver&#8217;s movements. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This project maps prominent locations mentioned in Johnathon Carver&#8217;s account of his adventures in the upper Mississippi Valley between 1766-1768. Carver was one of the first English explorers in this region prior to white settlement. His book, made up of journal entries and lengthy descriptions of the places, people and animals of the region was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40,"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/midterm.parrm.sites.carleton.edu\/midterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}