Draft

The date set of the Slave Sales between 1775 and 1865 contains information that can provide insight on how the slave trade operated. By simply looking at the information presented, you can see that some of the information correlates with one another to tell a story. The story that my first visualization focuses on is the appraisal value between gender and the states they were sold in. Before I could start my story I needed to accurately identify if there was a relationship between value and gender. The data showed that male slaves were significantly valued at a higher price point than female slaves. The average male slave would be sold between the average price of $172 and $777, depending on the state. Women average price was  between $113 and $639. Although the data does not directly state why males valued more, we can infer that males would be of more use on plantations. If a master was looking for someone who was physically capable, could withstand long tired-some hours, work fast and carrying heavy loads, he would obviously go for a male slave. However, this does not mean that women slaves were disregard. Women slaves were still valued because they were capable of bearing children, being house servant, and possessing skills that made them useful.When age played a  factor, my data showed a relationship between the age and value of the slave. The data showed that whether it was  male or female slave, the average slave sold would be about 18 to late 20’s (prime age) and would be valued high than someone of a later age. The last aspect is how the different states play a role in my visual story. Incorporating the state gives a different perspective of how the selling of slaves differed in the territories. For example state, state such as North/South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland showed their average age of slaves being between the ages of 4 and 12, rather than 18 to 27 like other states. It is possible that theses states were more interested in selling children or they didn’t keep a better records of the ages of slaves and therefore some slaves would be unaccounted for. Another example is how states played a role in the value of slaves. For states such as Georgia, Louisiana and especially Mississippi both women and male valued significantly higher than the other states. It is possible that these states were more popular plantations. Therefore, more slaves were migrated into these states and migrated out of the states with fewer slaves.

One thought on “Draft

  • April 18, 2016 at 6:58 PM
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    As a general writing comment, be careful with your proofreading–you’ve got a lot of places where you drop words out of your sentence, or there’s errors like “valued high than” instead of “valued higher than.” Things like this affect the clarity of your argument if your reader has to stop and figure out your meaning. Give yourself time to read out loud or have a friend proof read for the final post.

    Really good observations re: variations between states and average value. I think in class I saw you working on a map of this as well–what difference does showing your data in these two ways make? Would more detail by county tell you anything? Remember that you can refer back to the American Panorama project (it sounds like you’re already thinking about this, just be sure to cite) as well as other sources like our textbook from last semester.

    For your bar graph, why is Average Age grouped in with Average Appraised Value? If you want to see if there’s a relationship between age, state, and value, try dropping average age onto color in the marks pane and filtering out people with zero for age.

    For Sheet 3, with skill/sex/value, you should spend some time making groups–for example, “laborer or field work” and “laborer or fieldwork” are right now two separate categories, when really they’re the same thing. Likewise the difference between midwife and nurse might not make that much difference for your research questions, so think about what kind of categories are important for the questions you’re asking.

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