IDSC 130, Carleton College, Winter 2017
This project was created by Will Richards, Tom Choi, and David Coleman. We are all seniors at Carleton, and we’ve all enjoyed this class. There are two primary elements to the project: a map of the discovered shipwrecks from 0-1500 AD, and a series of historical summaries of nine ancient port cities. Also included are a brief analysis of the dataset and the trends within it along with a description of the processes we made use of in the creation of this project. Enjoy!
David, Tom, and Will
Excerpt from our timeline of deliverables:
Progress: What have you done so far, who have you talked to, what have you gathered, and what have you built?
Our first point of action was to clean our dataset. We determined which variables and information we wanted to display and store, and which variables and information we would throw out. We then designed a relational database to store our dataset with minimum redundancy. From there we connected to our MySQL database and created an XML file containing our data in an appropriate structure. Next, we embedded a Google Maps window into the main page of our website. Lastly, we created ‘markers’ for our map, data structures which currently contain the geolocation and comments from each ship. These markers are displayed on our map.
Problems (and proposed solutions): What issues have you run into?
Have they forced you to change your initial plan?
Our initial plan is still on track. We have plenty of time to explore exactly how we want to present our data and site, so none of our plans have changed.
Do you have a proposed solution or do you need help formulating one?
n/a
Tools and techniques: What applications/languages/frameworks have you selected and how are you going to implement them?
Deliverables: An updated timeline of deliverables
(no change)
Is your project still on track?
Yep!
Our group – Will Richards, Tom Choi, and David Coleman – would like to create an interactive map of the world’s recorded shipwrecks from AD 1-1500. We hope to include information such as the date the ship was wrecked, the date it was discovered, the location of each shipwreck, and the contents of each ship. These parameters might be limited by the robustness of our data, but we will discover soon if that is the case. Our data come from the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilizations Scholarly Data Series in the form of the Summary Geodatabase of Shipwrecks AD 1-1500, current as of 2008. There are ~1000 observations in the database, each with most of the variables listed above. Certain variables look more reliably reported than others, but after some data restrictions and cleaning, each observation will be fit for analysis.
That analysis will include details of cargo change over time, geographic regions with greater than average shipwrecks, and periods of time in history with greater numbers of recorded shipwrecks. It is important to note that a crucial limitation of using recorded historical data like this is that we have neither a random sample nor the whole population of shipwrecks. We are working with the shipwrecks whose records and locations were recorded well enough that they were registered in this database, and there are very likely clear biases in the data as a result of that. There will almost certainly be a bias for ships coming from civilizations with better record-keeping (such as the Roman Empire, for example). This bias does not invalidate the inferences we will make with our data, it merely restricts the scope of those inferences. Any claims we make then be about ships similar to those in our dataset – including whatever trends we may end up finding there.
Before we do anything with our data, we first need to clean it to allow us to better categorize it by its cargo. The cargo column cells have many repeated single words (such as amphoras, silver, swords, ceramic, etc). Other fields have long text values describing the cargo in prose. We will decide on some number (to be determined) of discrete categories to group our cargo in, and classify text values as an enumerated category. In this way, we will be able to store our data as a relational database.
Once our data is cleaned and categorized, we can decide on which aspects of the data do we want to be able to filter or sort by. We can then begin integration between our web-map and MySQL database. Once our web map is complete, we can begin building other aspects of our website, such as a ‘featured wrecks’ page, ‘about us’ page, etc.
As far as a timeline of deliverables, our plan is:
This is the link to the project.
This interactive ‘ikiMap” gives a good idea of the project we are planning to attempt. It is an interactive map of the sunken ships of the Great Lakes of North America.
Henceforth, our group tag will be “DTW”
