A timeline of childbirth

This is a work-in-progress data essay

Alongside collecting information about women's work in archaeology, history, and heritage - including work related activities such as Education - the Beyond Notability project team sought to collect data on biographical 'life events' such as marriage, divorce, and parenthood. When it came time to consider how we might represent these 'life events' as data, our focus turned to ways that enabled us to understand what events like becoming a parent did to women's ability to pursue their work in the fields of archaeology, history, and heritage. And to methods of visualisation that disaggregated women from the whole, that made people and their individual lives easier to see.

The graph on this page shows all the women in our wikibase for whom we have 'had child in' data with a known date on which that event occurred. Each woman is represented by a single row. The rows are sorted by date of birth, with the earliest - Margaret Emily Blaauw, born 1798 - at the top and the latest - Jacquetta Hawkes, born 1910 - at the bottom. The right hand end of the row represents the last piece of data on the graph (rather than a data of death). Each row then shows four types of information:

What does organising and plotting the data in this way suggest?

That is, visualising this particular combination of data and interpreting what we see opens out the scope of enquiry rather than providing a settled representation of how in this period motherhood related to work in the fields of archaeology, history, and heritage. And just as importantly, the interpretation draws us towards a series of caveats - health warnings - required so as to not misread the visualistion and the underlying data it contains.

This might seem a bit of a downer to end on. But - we think - there is considerable merit to our approach to data capture. In particular by combining 'work' and 'life events' we open up linked data biography to asking better questions about the lifecourse as it relates to people of all genders. For example, in a forthcoming paper we argue that whilst the prevailing model for representing the life course as linked data - that is, the Wikidata data model - is adequate for representing the temporal relationship between most events across the lifecourse, it does a poor job with parenthood. That is, unless a person had a child who was themselves sufficiently notable to warrant a Wikidata entry, and in turn a date of birth, all other acts of childbirth on Wikidata are represented by ‘number of children’, a property that captures the number of children a person had – or has had so far – in their lifetime. This perspective disables the ability to see across and through life events. This in part can be explained by what is achievable through community and voluntary production of data using a platform such as Wikidata: a statement listing the number of children someone had will take considerably less time – and research – to implement than multiple statements recording the dates on which multiple children were born. But Wikidata is a central node within contemporary knowledge infrastructure. And by taking an atemporal viewpoint in some cases, whilst capturing granular temporal information in others, the model opens limited space for the rich, subtle, and granular conceptual changes required when researching and representing complex historical phenomena. This complexity is what our wikibase has sought to retain. As a result motherhood - where we are aware of it - relates to and is entangled other events in the lifecourse, with work in archaeology, history, and heritage; whatever that 'work' meant.

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  1. Inlines notes are easier to write, since you don't have to pick an identifier and move down to type the note. ↩︎

  2. Observable Framework Markdown ↩︎

  3. Footnote extension for OF ↩︎