In Winter 2021, I took an introductory course to the digital humanities, Hacking the Humanities, that is now considered a core part of the Digital Arts & Humanities minor at Carleton. For my final project, I collaborated with five other students to complete a digital humanities project of my own involving a dataset local to Carleton. I used data from the college’s zoobooks and alumni directory to create several maps in ArcGIS that visualized the geography of Carleton’s network.
At the beginning of the project, I downloaded a Google Chrome extension called Web Scraper and read through documentation and tutorials to learn how to use it. I then began the process of configuring the Web Scraper for the Alumni Directory, which involved creating a sitemap and ordering different selectors. I performed a query for each job field on the Carleton Alumni Directory and scraped the results into a CSV file, gathering each alum’s address, zip code, major, and class. Concurrently, one of my classmates downloaded and OCRed the zoobooks from 1970 to 2020.
After web scraping the entire directory, I combined the CSV files and used OpenRefine to clean up the data. After my group cleaned up all the data and combined it into one spreadsheet, I used the Google Sheets geocoder plugin to add coordinates to the zoobook data. I then imported this data into ArcGIS and used filters to create several maps showing the rise of international students on campus. You can read more about our process here.
My group created a StoryMap that provides context to the map. For the StoryMap, I completed archival research, reading through student interviews and conversations with the administration, to explain the trends in our maps.
