For my final project I decided to look at the 8th Albany County Milita. My first of too graphs is going to explore locations, places of origin and races of the men of the militia. My hope is to be able to show where around the world each man on the militia is from and from the complexions described in the muster roll understand better who the people were who formed this militia. While a majority of the men on the muster role hail from England and Germany and their racial backgrounds and appearances will be mostly indicative of western Europe, Im more interested in the number and the backgrounds of the men from the rest of the world. Places like the Caribbean and the Colonies, places that have been heavily colonized and mixed i’d especially like to see and explore their backgrounds. For example, how many indians made up the Albany Militia and where are they all from? From there i’d like to explore the possibilities of adding the other descriptive factors into the graph such as age and height to get an even better picture of the militia. In the end the point of this first graph is to understand who the men are that make up Albany’s defense during the American Revolution. Not only what races they were and their location of origin but also information like the general age of the militia. My second graph intends to look at the various trades of the men in the militia. My thought is to see what kinds of trades are being done by the men of Albany but also why trades are being conducted most. In this sense i hope to explore and create an idea of what the City of Albany (and its surrounding area since more than likely Albany itself had nowhere near this many men.) may have looked like at the time of the Revolution. Unfortunately my view of Albany will be flawed, or at the lest incomplete since this will only detail the men and their occupations in the city, and will be lacking what the women in city were doing at the time. At the same time though, this will at the very least give a solid idea of the general trades and lives of Albany’s citizens. As to how I’m going to visualize these graphs I currently only have bar graphs fro both but there is still more exploring to do to provide the best visuals for the information I hope to present. For the first graph I think a geo-dimensional graph would be the best way to present the information as location is central. My second graph currently isn’t bad as a general histogram but there are plenty of other visual I haven’t had a chance to fully explore (or understand). At its core though i want to show the larger picture of Albany during the American Revolution and the lives of those who lived and died for it.
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First, a general comment: Be careful of your proofreading and organization, even in short and early draft things like this. Your proposal is at times difficult to follow because of punctuation/capitalization issues and the lack of paragraph breaks. Keep this in mind for the drafts and final post.
For Indian, do you mean Native American or India Indian? From their places of birth, the men in this set who were ID’d as Indian are likely Native, but your comment on other colonies is interesting–Britain’s colonies are usually talked about as First Empire vs Second Empire, ie, the American colonies vs everything else, so it would be an interesting revision of that story if we’re seeing a lot of men from the Second Empire present in the First Empire colonies, especially if race factors into that. A filled or symbol map would make a nice complement to the other visualizations you’re thinking about.
Re: how well this represents Albany itself, you’re right that this is just a slice. Militias drew from pretty big geographic areas, in this case what’s now both Albany and Saratoga counties. That said, the population in 1790 was about 3500, so ~950 guys in 1760 is probably a big chunk of the male population.