Within this last week, my classmates and I had the opportunity to learn about a series of essential theories that helps guide us with our project in analyzing the history of Bates. Discussing the themes ranging from racial capitalism, archival power, and also converting qualatative expereince into data is critical to breaking down the historic actions of major institutions. Creating a more inclusive environment consists of decsontructing the archival power and also being able to use our privilege to create graphs that portray multiplate narratives. The major issue within most archives is the amount of value placed upon certain things that are within the archives and praising the wrong subjects. Praising the successes of someone rathjer than the faults of an institution leads to the repetition of historic issues and leads to further repercussions. Analyzing what is valuable to institutions presents the values that are there and does not allow for narratives such as constructive criticism or change to be present in a discussion. An environment that restricts discussion is one that is close minded and fixed upon unethical ideologies.
The things that changed my perspective on something that I already knew consist of the idea of archival power and the potential for change in the world based upon the ability to derive narratives from documents. By analyzing what is treasured within the Bates College archive, we gain perspective on the false narratives that transform into factual information. The portrayal of founding a school solely through a small group of people is not ethical due to the enslaved lives that contributed and the significant portion of unpaid labor. The residue of slavery is the lack of recognition towards mistakes, and also the lack of reparations made to those of decent. The narratives provided by Bates College completely disregards the work done by a plethora of people (especially women, people of color, and those with a fluid gender/and or sexuality) and only embraces the work typically done by the white man. Our mission is to dismantle the historic habits that only embrace this demographic. Our mission is to understand the narratives that are within large narratives and that is how our data can portray this. Furthermore, understanding the potential of using data to create innovation for equality is paramount to understanding the potential narratives. With the data that has been collected through historic surveys and writings, we can truly deconstruct what motives were made and why so much history is “hidden” within large institutions. Being able to analyze one dimensional is not sufficient enough to provide a narrative for all people.
Scatter Plot
Looking at the data above, I provided two scatter plots and also providing a revised one with a renamed vec1 and vec2 axis as the two sets of data of analysis What the scatterplot and calculation of correlation portray are the specific days of the month that typically invited more people to contribute and donate. What we notice according to the scatter plot is not only the wide variety of days in the month that encouraged people to donate, but also the potential that this strategy can have to solve other issues regarding the donations. With this strategy, we are able to use the code to discover the race of people that were involved, the gender (in which we are not fully able to encorporate due to people in the mid 1800s not being able to truly express themselves) but also other aspects of the time such as political affiliation.
Calculation of correlation of the relationship between the money donated and the day of the month
Using the code “cor(vec1, vec2) we can have access to finding the direct correlation and correlation value. Regarding the topic of correlation, since we know the correlation does not immediately conclude as causation, it is difficult to come to a complete conclusion due to the fact that the data provides a wide range of plots on the graph. Other numerical attributes that would be interesting in plotting with regards to the Maine State Seminary is plotting the race of people that have contributed. Discussing race within this topic is essential because only analyzing age or dates does not tell the entire story of an era. By finding segments within a large piece of data allows another large narrative to be portrayed. Being able to present data beyond one dimension is essential to present the possible narratives within one specific portion of data. By presenting the data on a scatter plot, we can determine other segmenrts of history that is typically not brought to light.
To conclude, we should think about the Main State Seminary data in light of the Fuentes reading by discussing the implications of understanding the potential that archives have in providing ethical narratives that represent all people rather than specific demographics. After having group discussions this week, we’ve come to the conclusion that many institutions that are proud of their history and archives are hiding the majority of information that contain a more clear representation of all groups of people that are part of the community. It is critical to think of data that we record in multiple dimensions rather than one because we have the potential to reflect upon the multiple messages that we may derive from them all.
