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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Reorganizing information as data

What, exactly, does this mean? Excellent question! Think of this as the process of creating a spreadsheet and then populating it will all the information you want to extract from a source.

Executing this task is the most important step in the Imperiia process. Why? Another excellent question. The answer is that good data paves the way for responsible, insightful analysis. In order to produce "good" data one must follow the 3 golden rules:

Consistency (You can make up your own rules. If you decide to round down instead of up, that's fine - it is your game. Just be consistent.)
Transparency (You can make up your own rules. And your own abbreviations. And your own column headings. Just make sure you document your decisions so that you, or your successor, can easily recreate your process.)
Minimalism (In other words, put one piece of information - and one piece only - in each cell of your spreadsheet.)

This page is referenced by:

Converting Documents to Data 1 plain 2019-06-27T01:50:24-04:00
Scholars in some fields have the pleasure of downloading ready-made (though never perfect) data to use in their analyses. Those of us attempting to map the past are rarely so fortunate. Instead, it falls to us to translate the historical record into the lingua franca of the digital age. In some cases this process can be automated; in others it must be done by hand.

Either way, the task is daunting. After all, imperial regimes generated an astonishing amount of paper. The process of moving from document to data involves some combination of the following steps (which are often repeated and do not necessarily happen in neat order):
- critical study of the source
- articulation of the kinds of information it contains
- assessment of the scalability of the information
- identification of the ways in which the information from this source relates to the information contained in other sources
- reorganization of the source information as data
- documentation of the decisions that enable the conversion from source to spreadsheet
This process applies to the full range of historical sources: archival documents, historical maps, paintings, narrative texts, statistical tables, you name it. The point is not to simplify or reduce the complexity of historical source, but rather to identify its constituent parts and innovate ways to allow sources from a variety of genres to "speak" to one another.