Elections then
DSL's Voting America provides historical election data
Andrew Torget, DSL director, shows off a map from the Voting America site.BY JOAN TUPPONCE
Digital Scholarship Lab Director Andrew Torget can’t predict who will win the upcoming presidential election, but he can pull up data to show how America has voted in every election since 1840.
The lab’s “Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008” project (americanpast.richmond.edu/voting) examines the evolution of presidential politics in the United States across the span of American history through the use of cinematic and interactive maps.
“This year Virginia is one of the battle states,” Torget says. “In an election that is supposedly all about change, these maps allow you to actually measure change.”
“We expect Voting America to be used by some national news media on election night,” Torget says.
In recent months, Torget has received e-mails from people as far away as Alaska who are interested in the current election. “They want to look at what’s happened before and try to guess what’s going to happen in November,” he says.
The Digital Scholarship Lab opened its doors in October 2007.
“The idea,” Torget explains, “was to create a space to see what digital tools could do for humanities research. In the digital age, we are overwhelmed with information. No one person can go through it all by hand, but digital tools can sift through huge amounts of information for you.”
The Voting America project helps show people the research possibilities that exist. To create the project, the lab used 1.6 billion votes or pieces of information to show how America voted from 1840 to 2004. There were 42 elections in those 164 years.
“We had to try to figure out how to make that much information useful so someone could see the patterns,” Torget says. “People talk about red and blue states, but when we look closely at voting, it turns out that it’s not as divided as Electoral College maps lead us to believe.”
The data was loaded into mapping software using Geographic Information Systems. The lab’s staff looked at information in a variety of ways before coming up with the two types of maps used: cinematic and interactive.
Cinematic maps present data that relates to voting trends across time, such as presidential election voting by county; margins of victory in presidential elections by county; and counties won in popular voting. There are nine overviews within the maps.
The interactive map allows users to ask their own questions and create their own maps. Research opportunities vary, from mapping the strength of political parties by county to exploring the margins of victory between winning and losing candidates in any county. The maps also allow viewers to zoom into any region or state in the nation to examine the maps with greater detail through an interface similar to Google Earth.
The lab is meant to support people who are just getting used to using digital tools. “It’s a sandbox zone for trying out ideas and experimentation,” Torget says.
Voting America is one of two recent DSL projects. The other, the History Engine (historyengine.richmond.edu), a teaching-based project, helps professors use technology to promote active learning and collaboration in the classroom.
“Information can be added, like in a moderated Wikipedia. Teachers are the gatekeepers in this project,” Torget explains. “Students can upload their research into the central database and then share their work with one another.”
Robert Nelson, associate director of the DSL, is heading up a new text mining project for the lab. Text mining uses computers to find language patterns in massive amounts of text. For example, Nelson is looking at the words used in The Daily Dispatch, a Richmond Civil War-era newspaper to see how they changed over the course of the war.
Nelson enjoys the collaborative nature of the work.
“It’s such a young field,” he says. “We don’t know the long-term effect on the humanities.”
Programmer analyst Nate Ayers is leading the visual design of the lab’s projects, such as Voting America. “It’s difficult sometimes to include visuals with historical information or data to be conveyed,” he explains. ”I like being able to input my aesthetic judgment and make the project more interesting visually.”
The project includes expert commentaries featuring Richmond faculty.
“We wanted to bring in experts who know a lot about particular moments in political history,” Torget says. “For example, in one of the commentaries we have President Ed Ayers talking about the Civil War.”
The work is cutting edge. “There is no template to follow,” Torget says. “We are always inventing.”
The lab will continue to add projects. The University has been awarded a $19,942 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to build on the work done with Voting America in visualizing data. The lab also received a $26,000 grant from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education that directly supports the History Engine.
“This lab is a center for discovery,” Torget says. “It will help support faculty as they try out ideas and see what is possible in the digital age.”