For this project,we created a “database” that tracked several pieces of information from news sources regrading suffrage activities in the early twentieth century. In the hopes that a picture would emerge, we tracked numerous fields in the hopes that through analysis a picture would emerge. Event location, participation numbers, spectator numbers and date were pretty much widely available. We were interested in police presence and men’s participation as well so it was noted but not widely available.
Had we used an actual relational database platform, I think a somewhat robust analysis of the information we gathered would have been possible. However, since Airtable is little more than an Excel workbook made up of several sheets and querying was not possible, such analysis was impractical. Tracking back and forth to determine the values of ID fields seems impractical when there are good solutions for doing such. I would have been interested in which cities had positive outpouring of men’s support, which cities had a more pronounced police presence or arrests made or even how the participation numbers may have grown in the years leading up to the passage of the suffrage amendment.
As it is, the only thing that stood out were reporting discrepancies in attendance numbers. I noticed that the numbers reported by different sources varied wildy and makes one wonder how effectively any real analysis of such information could be done. It may say something about the poilitcs of the paper or simply the epistemological limitations of estimating large crowd sizes. Perhaps we have gotten better at it or perhaps news agencies all agree on a number from the AP or come to a consensus on their own.
I am disappointed that we didn’t utilize a more robust tool as I think that this could have been an interesting project. I considered porting all my data into MSAccess and doing some analysis but ran out of time. I may still do that for fun if there is a straightforward way of dumping data out of Airtable.
