All posts by jwbaker

James Baker is Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton. James is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and holds degrees from the University of Southampton and latterly the University of Kent, where in 2010 he completed his doctoral research on the late-Georgian artist-engraver Isaac Cruikshank. James works at the intersection of history, cultural heritage, and digital technologies. He is currently working on a history of knowledge organisation in twentieth century Britain. In 2021, I begin a major new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women’s Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage, 1870 – 1950'. Previous externally funded research projects have focused on legacy descriptions of art objects ('Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship', Arts and Humanities Research Council), the preservation of intangible cultural heritage ('Coptic Culture Conservation Collective', British Council, and 'Heritage Repertoires for inclusive and sustainable development', British Academy), the born digital archival record ('Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities', European Commission), and decolonial futures for museum collections ('Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections', Arts and Humanities Research Council). Prior to joining Southampton, James held positions of Senior Lecturer in Digital History and Archives at the University of Sussex and Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab, Digital Curator at the British Library, and Postdoctoral Fellow with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research Digital History seminar, a member of The Programming Historian Editorial Board and a Director of ProgHist Ltd (Company Number 12192946), and an International Advisory Board Member of British Art Studies.
Caricature, DHums, History, Research

Week 4: Heatmaps

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A short post this week the purpose of which is to share some more outputs from my project to map businesses auxiliary to the Georgian satirical print trade.

Below are two visualisations generated from the 1794 Kent’s London Directory and the 1808 London Post Office Directory. This time I’ve used a MapQuest script in Google Docs to geocode the address data (excellent tutorial here), cross-referenced the geocoding against Get Lat Lon and Locating London’s Past (which was necessary because – among other things – MapQuest was incapable of finding the Strand and Fleet Street), exported it all as a .geojson, and plugged the data into TileMill.

If you enjoy mapping data and haven’t used TileMill, I’d recommend spending an afternoon with it. Because if you are not interested in satellite imagery, TileMill is far more flexible and intuitive than Google Earth Pro, allowing you – for example – to add CSS styling to your data. In the images below I have ‘faked’ the heatmaps by simply turning down the opacity of each marker point using CSS. The results are interesting, first in teasing out the splintering of the east-west axis between 1794 and 1808, and second with regards to the increased use of the title ‘engraver’.

ABOVE Selected data from the Kent’s Directory for the Year 1794
Colourmen: Yellow — Copper trade: Orange
Engravers: Grey — Paper Trade: White
Stationers: Blue — Printsellers: Red
ABOVE Selected data from the Post Office Directory 1809
Colourmen: Yellow — Copper trade: Orange
Engravers: Grey — Paper Trade: White
Stationers: Blue — Printsellers: Red

Above all else it feels somehow liberating to be free to having plot on top of ‘real’ London and concentrate instead on the patterns the data generated. I have plenty of thoughts on this data which I will save for a later post (probably after I’ve given a research paper on October 24th based – among other things – on this data), but in the meantime if anyone is interested in an idiots guide to TileMill I’ll happily write one up for next week.

EDIT: Just a note to say that I’ve turned off the ‘Stationers’ in the above visualisations because their sheer volume crowds out everything else. I will definitely come back to them in more depth in a later post.