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Not much research has been done on slavery in Texas. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, one of the most comprehensive projects on runaway slaves in the South, does not even include Texas in the data or analysis, but rather implies that slavery seems to be relatively universal throughout the South. Randolph B. Campbell opened the discussion of slavery in Texas through his book An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865, but agreed with Franklin and Schweninger on the similarities across the country. William Dean Carrigan, however, took another position in the chapter on Texas in his book Slavery and Abolition: he argued that slavery in Texas (specifically in central Texas) was unique from that in other Southern states. However, the lack of information on the topic indicates the need for additional research in order to reach a more definitive conclusion.

Why would Texas be different from other states? Since Texas was the frontier of plantation agriculture, many diverse groups interacted with the slaveholders and their slaves. Mexicans (to the south) and Indians (to the north and west) increased owner fears and possibly runaway occurrences as well. The proximity of Mexico and the absence of a fugitive slave law there made it a more desirable runaway location than the North, which was still impacted by fugitive slave laws. The presence of Indian tribes just on the outskirts of the plantation culture provided another possible refuge for runaways. Although not all Indians were friendly to runaway slaves and although the proximity of Mexico did not necessarily result in increased runaway occurrences, both of these factors could have contributed to the culture of slavery in Texas. In addition the lower population density and wooded terrain of central Texas were possible advantages for runaways.

These factors not only framed the diversity of options available to runaways but also impacted slaveholders’ perceptions of their slaves. How did slaveholders react to the many runaway possibilities? Did they treat or perceive their slaves differently? Or were Texas slaveholders essentially the same as slaveholders in any other state? Runaway slave advertisements allow a glimpse into these perspectives through the language they use to describe the slaves. These advertisements were prevalent throughout the South prior to the Civil War, and are thus an important historical resource for historians. Our project will compare Texas advertisements (from the Houston Telegraph) with those from other states in order to contribute toward a more comprehensive view on slavery in Texas.

In order to accomplish this, we will utilize various digital tools. The term “digital history” addresses two different perspectives: using digital tools to discover new information and using the digital to present those findings. By exploring different methodologies, we may be able to benefit historians as a whole by contributing to future ways of working with data. In addition, we are interested in the digital presentation of history: what are the various benefits and disadvantages of each method? The basic essay format is only one of many ways of presenting information, and other genres provide unique perspectives on the same argument. These explorations will contribute to both the historical and the methodological in the context of Texas runaway slaves and the digital humanities, allowing our research to stretch beyond the specific into future possibilities of genre and method.

Today in class we stepped back for a moment to think about the various methods we could use to compare runaway ads from different states. Our current, still subject to change job is to build a site that would compare different methods for answering the question: "Were Texas runaway slave ads different from slave ads in other Southern states?"

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Not much research has been done on slavery in Texas. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, one of the most comprehensive projects on runaway slaves in the South, does not even include Texas in the data or analysis, but rather implies that slavery seems to be relatively universal throughout the South. Randolph B. Campbell opened the discussion of slavery in Texas through his book An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865, but agreed with Franklin and Schweninger on the similarities across the country. William Dean Carrigan, however, took another position in the chapter on Texas in his book Slavery and Abolition: he argued that slavery in Texas (specifically in central Texas) was unique from that in other Southern states. However, the lack of information on the topic indicates the need for additional research in order to reach a more definitive conclusion.

Why would Texas be different from other states? Since Texas was the frontier of plantation agriculture, many diverse groups interacted with the slaveholders and their slaves. Mexicans (to the south) and Indians (to the north and west) increased owner fears and possibly runaway occurrences as well. The proximity of Mexico and the absence of a fugitive slave law there made it a more desirable runaway location than the North, which was still impacted by fugitive slave laws. The presence of Indian tribes just on the outskirts of the plantation culture provided another possible refuge for runaways. Although not all Indians were friendly to runaway slaves and although the proximity of Mexico did not necessarily result in increased runaway occurrences, both of these factors could have contributed to the culture of slavery in Texas. In addition the lower population density and wooded terrain of central Texas were possible advantages for runaways.

These factors not only framed the diversity of options available to runaways but also impacted slaveholders’ perceptions of their slaves. How did slaveholders react to the many runaway possibilities? Did they treat or perceive their slaves differently? Or were Texas slaveholders essentially the same as slaveholders in any other state? Runaway slave advertisements allow a glimpse into these perspectives through the language they use to describe the slaves. Through the utilization of various digital tools and comparison of the Texas advertisements (from the Houston Telegraph) with those of other states, we hope to contribute an additional facet to the debate on slavery in Texas.

Daniel and I have been working on looking more closely at the advertisements from Arkansas and Mississippi digitized in the Documenting Runaway Slaves project. Using regular expressions, we are cleaning up the text files in Text Wrangler to remove unwanted information, such as footnotes, extra dates, and page numbers. Our goal is to find out how many total ads there are for each state, how many ads there are in each particular newspaper, and how many ads there are between the years 1835-1860. Below is our progress divided by state.

Arkansas Advertisements – Daniel

By using regular expressions to search for individual dates for ads and separate them into individual text files, we were able to identify 457 separate ads for Arkansas.  Within this subdivision, searching the years of the groups narrowed down the pool of ads to 324 within the range of 1835-1860.

Uploading the text to Voyant Tools, I was able to use the ResoViz tool to identify the different organizations in the ads.  This gave a strong pointer towards which newspaper titles occur most frequently within the base of ads.  Searching for these in the text in Text Wrangler, I was then able to count how many occurrences there were with the “Find All” feature.  This search found 272 occurrences of the Arkansas Gazette.  28 of these were overcounted due to mentions in footnotes (which we were unable to remove from the PDF).  Removing these left an adjusted count of 244 runaway ads in the Arkansas Gazette from 1835-1860.  A similar search revealed the runner-up publications of ads to be 35 ads by the Washington Telegraph during this time, and 31 by the Arkansas Advocate.

Mississippi Advertisements – Kaitlyn

First, I removed the extra date headers by using the regular expression #1, posted as a gist on my github account. Then, I removed the page numbers by using regular expression #2. That’s when I started seeing some issues in how the text copied over from the PDF file I downloaded from the Documenting Runaway Slaves advertisement. As shown in the picture below, I discovered that every time a superscript (such as ^th, ^st, or ^nd) is used, the text does not copy over in the correct order.

As you can see on line 342, the text abruptly cuts off right where the ^th superscript should be, and the rest of the text that follows is now placed on line 351. The superscript has been placed on line 341 (or line 347 — both contain “th”). The superscripts for numbers were not used consistently throughout the document, so it is not a consistent problem for all of the advertisements. It also poses more of a problem when we start using the advertisements for analysis.

One other problem I discovered is that some of the dates in the [date Month year] format is that some of the lines end in a period, some do not have a period, and some have bracketed edited information. Therefore, I had to use regular expression #3 to figure out how many advertisements the document contained. I found 1633 matches, which was about four times as many as we found from Arkansas. I additionally used regular expression #4 to figure out how many advertisements we had from the period of 1835-1860, and I discovered 1060 matches. There possibly could have been a more effective way to do this, but I think I was able to find them all using that expression.

I am still working on figuring out how to remove all of the footnotes. The footnotes do not seem to have any similarities between them except for a number at the beginning of a line, so it is difficult to remove them without removing advertisement information as well. Additionally, I will use ResoViz to see how many advertisements we have from each newspaper as Daniel did with the Arkansas ads, but because there are too many ads collected from Mississippi to analyze them all at the same time using Voyant, this task is taking longer than I originally thought it would.

My project involves writing an introductory explication detailing the background of runaway slave research in Texas. After I finished re-reading the chapters by Campbell and Carrigan, I outlined a basic structure for the essay, included below:

1. An introductory paragraph, including a hook to grab interest (comparison of descriptions of October 1835 slave rebellion by Campbell and Carrigan) and information about the work that has been completed on Texas up to this point
2. Present a general overview of the argument that Texas is the same as other Southern states, then transition to a more specific focus on the spectrum of reactions to slavery (submission, rebellion, and somewhere in between).
3. Categorization of various types of runaways (long term, toward family, to woods, habitual)
4. Present a general overview of the argument that Texas is unique, addressing the issue of how it would differ (in its process or in the overall result). Introduce the central concept of Texas as a frontier on multiple levels (western frontier of plantation agriculture, surrounded by multiple cultures).
5. Address the impact of the proximity of Mexico on slavery in Texas, discussing Mexico’s fugitive slave policy in contrast to that of the North, the increase of fears in slave holders, the slightly higher number of runaways (both from Texas and outside of Texas), and the impact of the prevalence versus the climate of slaves and slave holders
6. Discuss Indian interaction with slaves, specifically the blessing and curse aspect of their relationship
7. Touch briefly on the slave rebellions
8. Specify that many of the arguments made were from the perspective of central Texas, and include information about the terrain, low population, and greater freedom of resource
9. Carrigan’s conclusion of the process as different but not the outcome. Differences become more similar with increased military control and increase in white population. Overall, climate was different because slaves had increased opportunities for running away, and thus had more leverage with their owners.
10. Possible causes and differences discussed in class, such as Texas before and after its entrance into the Union
11. Conclusion: more research is necessary on runaways in Texas

The structure may change slightly after writing it. Currently, I do not envision using many specific examples and will probably focus on generalizations. I plan on completing a rough draft of the background information by Wednesday, but in the meantime, I would appreciate any comments or suggestions on my current outline!

We are trying to parse newspaper images into discrete, smaller image components containing separate articles – which (unsurprisingly) is proving more difficult than we imagined. We are trying to use OpenCV to separate different articles from each other by identifying lines in the newspaper and using those lines to separate articles, but the line detection Hough Transformation program works very poorly on the input articles. We are now switching to finding the runaway slave icon in the text, which we are doing through image recognition software (HAR image detection) in OpenCV. We have not given up parsing documents by articles, though – which we are now considering parsing by image variation – detecting text from whitespace through pixel values, and then mapping text lines to find changes in text style corresponding to the end of one article and the beginning of another.

– Franco Bettati, Aaron Braunstein

Over the weekend, I completed the “Intro to Google Maps and Google Earth” tutorial from The Programming Historian. I learned how to import a dataset into a layer on Google Maps. The tutorial used data about UK Global Fat Supply from 1896, and through changing the style of the placemarks, I created a map that colors the placemarks by what kind of commodity that region provided.

Additionally, I learned how to create my own placemarks, lines, and polygons (enclosed areas or regions) on Google Maps. Knowing how to create these vector layers could be important for our project because many of our historical questions deal with geography, such as the difference between the slaveholders’ “geography of confinement” versus the slaves’ “rival geography” (for a full list of questions, see our previous post about historical questions).  However, it is more likely that we will be creating spreadsheets with the data that we will eventually want to use in a map, such as the location of the slave owner or the possible location the slave ran. Overall, Google Maps seems like a pretty simple tool for plotting locations or events. One of the main drawbacks of Google Maps, however, is that it can only import the first 100 rows of a dataset and only 3 datasets for a total of 300 features. It seems like we possibly have more data without narrowing the advertisements down than Google Maps can hold.

The tutorial also let me explore some of the features of Google Earth. Google Earth has the ability to create vector layers like in Google Maps, but it also has more advanced features such as the ability to upload a historical map to overlay over a section of Google Earth.

Map of Canada from 1815 overlayed on Google Earth

Google Earth has an interesting historical imagery view, which includes a sliding timeline bar that shows what a region looked like at a particular moment in time. Clare and I thought that we would be able to add placemarks with certain time stamps so that they only showed up at a certain point in time and then to animate the whole sequence. We tried valiantly to make it work, but the placemarks appeared regardless of which point in the timeline was selected on the timeline bar. At this point, without finding some sort of tutorial, I do not think we can go much further with animating placemarks on Google Earth.

We do think that being able to animate points in time would be useful for us to look at many of our historical questions. Neatline, a tool of the online exhibit creator Omeka, would give us the ability to do this. On Wednesday, I would like to take a closer look at what Neatline and TimeMapper (another tool for making “time maps”) do to see if either is something that we might want to pursue. In addition to looking at these time mapping tools during class, I want to look back over the tutorial on thematic data maps to better understand how Google Fusion Tables works. I think that these tools dealing with geography will potentially be useful in analyzing or presenting our data because of the focus on geography that many of our historical questions have.

After completing the tutorials for the geographical digital tools, Kaitlyn and I decided that change across time was an essential element of a mapping tool for our project with runaway ads. Google Fusion, although interesting and relatively accessible as far as understanding, does not fulfill those needs. Our primary focus, then, has been on Google Earth. Enabling “Historical Imagery” under “View” creates a timeline with slider from 1943 to 2014 of the map imagery at a given time. Our next concern, then, was how we ourselves could insert time-specific data into Google Earth. In the “Properties” of a placemark under the “View” tab, there is an option under Date/Time for Time span and Time stamp.

We inserted two placemarks with different time spans in order to test the feature. Although the movement of the time slider seemed to acknowledge the fact that the span of years was between 1960 and 1965, the markers did not disappear when the time span was absent. Our primary problem, then, is in trouble-shooting this problem, since the feature itself seems to represent something we could use as far as time span data.

Andrew suggested a more computer-science based option through KML and the use of programming and coding in order to possibly diagnose the error. In addition, while searching for assistance with Google Earth time span, I discovered a digital humanities document from UCLA on the topic that seems like it could be of assistance. It seems to be relatively step-by-step but  my limited knowledge of programming has left me confused with how to work with this possible option.

Issues with Google Earth: it tends to crash or malfunction with relative frequency, which I have learned through previous path tracking work with it. For this reason, it would be more beneficial to find a tool that specializes in mapping over time, since the many features and possibilities are not necessary for our project and probably exacerbate the issue of frequent crashes.

One question that we would need to answer about our project is whether we want to map using regions or points. Regions would indicate frequency of runaways from a given area, or likelihood/projection of the owners on where their runaways have fled. A map of this sort would provide multiple layers of information about runaways: how likely they were to run away at a given time and how high runaway rates were in certain areas (if we wanted to focus solely on the latter question, we could probably use Google Fusion as our tool.)  A map with placemarks could easily become overcrowded with pinpoints. Although this problem could be solved through different color-coding techniques, any advantages of placemarks would be removed through getting rid of the specific location. Therefore, region-based mapping (around county, possibly?) seems to be the best option as far as runaway ads. Our data set would have to be examined in order to determine whether the information it provided would allow for such a system.

Today in class, we will possibly research the basic KML scripts that seem to be necessary for functioning of the Google Earth time span. With assistance, maybe we will be able to start working with the basic coding language using the steps from the UCLA document. We will also explore the timemapper option suggested by Dr. McDaniel over Twitter, in addition to neatline, a website that Kaitlyn was planning on exploring.  Once we determine whether or not these options are feasible for us, we will compare the possible time mapping tools and discuss their pros and cons in relationship to our particular topic of runaway slave ads and our specific data set.