Beyond Notability Data Essays

These data essays were written in Autumn/Winter 2024 as part of the Beyond Notability project, funded between 2021 and 2024 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (Project Reference AH/V01384X/1).

Taken together the data essays fulfil a key aim of the project: to experiment with interactive approaches to data recorded in our wikibase, a collection of 'linked data' about women's work in archaeology, history and heritage between 1870 and 1950. Encompassing over 30,000 statements related to over 900 women, the wikibase forms a major research output of the project.

The data essays can be read in any order. Each digs into a facet of our wikibase, moving between data, what that data represents (or, more correctly in most cases, is trying to represent), and how that data is presented in visual form. As historians who use computational methods, we were drawn both to topical questions - patterns relating to education, how motherhood interacted with work - and to questions about computational historical methods - the nature of residence and date data, the alure of network visualisations. The results are necessarily exploratory, reflexive, and cautionary, and follow D'Ignazio and Klein in rejecting the seemingly inherent positivism of data visualisation. Instead, by producing visualisations that change as you hover over them, tweak a parameter, toggle an option, or even just expand and contract your browser, we urge the reader to use explorations of data at scale as always fluid and partial acts of making and remaking undertaken in the service of historical analysis. Yes, computational historians can and will put 'finished' graphs on a page. But before they do that they will do a lot of what these data essays enable you to do: play. So, enjoy! (And for more examples of our process of play, see our miscellaneous interactives and Sharon's work-in-progress notes)

Suggested citation:

Sharon Howard and James Baker, Beyond Notability Data Essays (https://beyond-notability.github.io/beyond-notability-observable-essays/, 2025)

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