Upon returning to semi-normal capacity and scheduling, I collaborated with Julia to build a clear record of Hamilton’s as it represents and prioritizes accessibility. We focussed on two different periods: Julia handled much of the founding documents’ data visualization while I updated our source documentation for all of the Hamilton sources. Additionally, I took on modern sources, identifying Hamilton’s contemporary recalling of their founding (from their website) versus the experiences of their community members through student publications. If I choose to increase the scope of access I would add perspectives from both the school’s public relations and the student body at the establishment of Affirmative Action.
I completed data visualization using Voyant. This decision was made to keep our visualizations consistent and because the Links feature was useful for what I was attempting to discover: what were the negative reflections related to and who is responsible for them. In clarifying that much of Hamilton’s failures around access are related to neglect and superficial adjustments instead of deep, infrastructural commitments, I could identify the pattern reflected in Julia’s visualizations. Both the “access” to the Oneida Nation and current members of the campus community are nothing more to the school than a means to an end. The end is a dominance of resources, spaces, and messaging.
By clarifying this, our next step is the comparative component. As the Vassar members of our group continue to compile archival and modern reflections of access to their campus, we will observe shared verbiage and intention. This means identifying what themes of change around access were made in each of the periods we chose, how did the changes affect others, and what were the motivations for each change.
The goal for week 8 is to compile our four visualizations into an intuitive reading experience that clearly explains why we chose the topic and where it shows up in each period we analyzed.
