Methodology
In order to demonstrate how the urban environment shared by Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman helped form their picture of Government and the Nation, we are gathering presently uncollected factual data about the city that served as both the center of the Union’s War effort and a divided nation. It was a city in which hospitals arose overnight, wounded men moved in and out, “contraband camps” of fugitive slaves developed, and temporary shelters were erected to house the city’s swelling population, which tripled during the four years of the War.
At the heart of the project is a richly layered, interactive base map plotting both geographic and temporal data that clarify the transformation of Washington, DC. We populate this map with information drawn from an SQL database. Increasingly as our work progresses, this data will make it possible to analyze change over time as both physical structures grew and the population developed a new ethnic and racial mix. Our project will demonstrate the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach to studying such a transformation—localized in space, concentrated in time, and profound in its implications—using relational databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Geography Markup Language (GML). We believe that by providing a detailed backdrop of census, health, and hospital records; theater schedules; horsecar routes; and other factual data, we will deepen our understanding of the transformation of the nation and its capital, and the limits and possibilities offered to those like Whitman and Lincoln who were key to that transformation.
Various fields of the humanities are becoming both more visual and more attuned to the study of space. We are concentrating on a one hundred square mile diamond shaped area. We necessarily have to be selective in what data we collect. The initial topics for inclusion—fortifications, theaters, hospitals—promise to highlight key aspects of Civil War Washington life. As time allows we will add information about government buildings, transportation routes, population change, and other topics.
Ultimately, the substantial body of textual material collected for the project will consist of primary, critical, and contextual documents, including Whitman’s wartime poetry, notebooks, and journalism, as well as his family’s correspondence. While key aspects of Whitman’s textual record remain to be adequately edited and made accessible, the documentary record of Lincoln’s life is thorough. In addition, a rich day-by-day record of Lincoln’s activities is already available electronically at the Lincoln Log (stg.brown.edu/projects/lincoln/). For Lincoln, our efforts will go toward illuminating the existing documentary record through contextualization. We will trace his spatial movements, follow his interests in the theater, provide census information to help characterize neighborhoods, and trace the development of fortifications, “contraband” camps, and hospitals. Making this disparate information available in the context of a data-rich set of maps will enable cultural analysis grounded in specifics of time and space.
Recognizing that we cannot advance on all parts of our project at once, we will focus the next two years on ways in which medical sciences and public health were influenced by the War, using Washington, DC, as the base of study. During the War, the center of American medicine moved from Philadelphia to Washington, where soldiers from both sides of the conflict were treated by the tens of thousands. The DC/Baltimore corridor became the site of major advances in medical education and care, including training future doctors by clinical examination. In the U.S. history of medicine, there is no more important story. Our aim is to provide data and tools for analysis that will enable scholars to understand this pivotal moment in history. Focusing on this critical time and place, we will highlight events that shaped modern U.S. medicine in a fresh, multi-disciplinary, multi-media way.