Viz your PhD!
Visualizing historical data from doctoral theses
A collaboration among PhD candidates at the end of their doctoral journeys, aimed at making their research more accessible to a broader audience using data visualization.
Team
Data visualization researcher Aida Horaniet Ibañez
Historians: Suzana Cascao, Irene Portas Vázquez and Daniel Richter
An interdisciplinary collaboration in which historians become familiar with the entire process from data collection to visualization, use visuals to identify errors and challenge initial hypotheses and communicate findings, opening a different entry point to their dissertations, more accesible to different audiences. On the other hand, the data visualization researcher has the opportunity to explore three very different historical datasets in terms of size, scope and historical challenges.
During this exercise we observed some interesting paradigm shifts, opportunities and challenges, such as moving from text to graphs as the central element of communication, while maintaining the right level of complexity and details about the process; or the learning curve associated to data visualization tools.
Daniel Richter
Repurposing historic civil registers to fill blind spots
Daniel Richter worked with the population census sheets from 1895 until 1935, that provided information about the living circumstances, families, and occupations of the population, but for some time periods, these have not been preserved. During his PhD, he noticed the potential of civil birth and marriage registers in Luxembourg. They had been previously used for background checks or family relations of individuals, but not for quantitative research. These registers collected similar data to the censuses and were consistently available for every year between 1798 and 1923. So, he tried to use these as a replacement for the lack of census data to address the assumption that Luxembourg, in contrast to most industrial centers, did not develop a real “proletarian” class at the beginning of the 20th century and track the transformation of village-like behaviour to urbanized behaviour of the population of Esch.
Suzana Cascao
Landownership, family trajectories and demographic changes of the turn of the century
In the framework of her doctoral thesis on upper middle classes in Esch sur Alzette, the work presented in the data visualization represents one chapter of her thesis on which she worked for almost two years collecting data on landownership in between the late 19th and early 20 th century. This dataset comes from the Administration du Cadastre et Topographie and it collects data on landed transactions from each individual/citizen that has ever entered such a transaction, of selling, buying or simply transmitting land onwards to some family member. For the analysis, Suzana selected 20 landowners whose transactions she tracked throughout their lifetime with the goal to identify their relationship to the social space in the city amidst the industrialization boom.
Irene Portas Vázquez
Smuggling Stories: Diving into the border between France and Luxembourg (1921-1937)
Irene’s research explored clandestine cross-border activities between France and Luxembourg in the interwar years. In the customs museum in Bordeaux, she found a very precious archive: a register written from 1921 to 1937 that contained details about smuggling cases, from which she created a database to understand what goods and what quantities were smuggled, who were the people smuggling, and how this illegal practice evolved over the years. This data gave her a lot of information about the social and economic context of the French-Luxembourgish border in the 1920s and 30s: food products, role of women and children or difficult times during economic downturn, enabling us to view smuggling not as a criminal activity but as enmeshed in its historical context.
