WPI Students Team Up with “A New Nation Votes”

Here at AAS we are always happy to collaborate with that institution across the street, Worcester Polytechnic Institute.  The students there are required to do what is called an Interactive Qualifying Project, which involves a digital humanities project.  To that end, Dan Boudreau and Bryan MacDonald produced “A New Commonwealth Votes: Using GIS to Analyze the Politics of Turn-of-the-19th-Century Massachusetts,” a project that combines emerging GIS software with our New Nation Votes project (whose brand new website will be unveiled by the end of the month).  Boudreau and MacDonald produced a 100-page report complete with a dizzying 80 different maps that analyzed the Congressional elections of 1798 and 1800.

This project, combined with earlier work from their fellow student Kris Kellogg, is hopefully just the first step into a larger world of combining the massive research work of Philip Lampi with emerging software that will allow the New Nation Votes project to take that next step into the world of mapping technology.