Sapping Attention: Data narratives and structural histories: Melville, Maury, and American whaling

Note: this post is part I of my series on whaling logs and digital history . For the full overview, click here . Data visualizations are l...

Sapping Attention: Data narratives and structural histories: Melville, Maury, and American whaling Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Data narratives and structural histories: Melville, Maury, and American whaling Note: this post is part I of my series on whaling logs and digital history . For the full overview, click here . Data visualizations are like narratives: they suggest interpretations, but don't require them. A good data visualization, in fact, lets you see things the interpreter might have missed. This should make data visualization especially appealing to historians. Much of the historian's

related reading

• Maps & Visualizations gallery | Ben Schmidtbenschmidt.org
• Art and Accounting in the Age of Whaling | Hakai Magazinehakaimagazine.com
• How we used gigabytes of shipping data to show risks to endangered whales | NPR Visuals + Editorial Graphicsblog.apps.npr.org
• Harvesting Light: New England Whaling in the Nineteenth Century – Energy Historyenergyhistory.yale.edu
• Remembering Long Island Ladies Who Took to Sea - THE WHALING MUSEUMcshwhalingmuseum.org
• Opinion | We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was - The New York Timesweb.archive.org
• Heroines - THE WHALING MUSEUMcshwhalingmuseum.org
• Whaling Wives - Silas J. Costellosj-costello.com
• Stop aggregating away the signal in your data - Stack Overflowstackoverflow.blog
• Making Internet Things, part 3: Storytellingpudding.cool
• From Hermeneutics to Data to Networks: Data Extraction and Network Visualization of Historical Sources | Programming Historianprogramminghistorian.org
• Our Knowledge of History Decays Over Timepalladiummag.com