Plan for the Rest of the Semester

The last two weeks have been difficult from a conceptual point of view. I have been trying to determine how this website and computational methods in general can best serve my career, whether inside or outside academia. If I stay inside academia, I want to make sure that computational methods do real work, and are not just window dressings layered on top of a close reading of primary sources. Ideally, computational methods and close reading should work together, as we have observed in Underwood and other readings. The work I have done to this point in the class, especailly with the hospital statistics from 1803, is suitable for producing visaulizations. However, I worry that I do not have enough data from other periods and that further work with the material will be oif limited value for my dissertation. Because my dissetation runs from 1630 to 1815, I would feel more comfortable if I had statistics from a variety of periods and not just the Napoleonic Wars. I do not want to include visualizations simply for visualization’s sake. I plan on going on a second research trip to France where I hope to find more documents like the statistics from 1803 but I cannot be sure that such documents exist. In other words, I think another research trip France is necessary to know if the route I have been following this semester is viable in the long term.

To deal with this issue, I will spend the rest of the semester with an eye towards the non-academic job market by improving my skills in several areas and using the website as a way to demonstrate those skills. I hope to do five things to my website, There are only three week left in the semester, So I should aim to complete about 1.5 things to the website per week.

1. Beautify the Website: Here, I hope to alter how the posts are laid out and change the tabs at the top of the page to allow for easier navigation. Most importanty, I want to be able to post usuable images on the site. As of now, I can post images but they are too small to be viewable.
   (Update, 4/6/2021: I have messaged the creator of this website’s theme to see if he can help me with the layout of the homepage. Next, I found a way to make the images on the site more usable, although I am not totally satisfied with my method. I simply added a link under each image, which will take the viewer to a larger version of the image. This addresses the problem but looks a little rough. Next I add new tabs to the homepage of the webiste. These include CV, Data, and About. I have populated each tab with text. Finally, on the data tab I linked my Github repository and gave a data map to help people navigate. The rest of the semester will be devoted to working on steps 2-5.)
2. Produce a range of complex visualizations using R and Tableau: I have spent too much time with the hospital statisitics to discard them completely. Instead I will try to produce a map of hospital locations via tableau, and a variety of graphs using R.
3. Become a better text cleaner: I feel that my primary document of 1803 hospital statistics was an easy document to clean. I want to improve my skills in this area by cleaning several miltiary medical journals, documenting the process, and publishing the results to the website.
4. Produce tabular data from cleaned texts: Here I want to take the next step and make sure that I can use the cleaned journals to produce CSV or TSV files.
5. Produce a visualization from the journals: Lastly, I want to complete the process of working with the military medical journals by producing at least a simple vizualisation.

Future Plans

I hope to keep computational methods in my pocket as a tool going forward. I would like to find a way to make useful for my dissertation, but I have not found it this semester. After my second research trip, I will have a better idea of what types of computational methods I can use in the dissertation. As of now, I might be able to do a prosopography or network analysis of military medical practitioners. This would be a later chapter in the dissertation, and I was not yet ready to tackle it this semester. Also, many of the documents that speak to this issue are handwritten and not easily OCR’d.