April 2012 – Higbie

Improving Wikipedia, one student-editor at a time

Students in History 191D (Winter 2016), The Immigration Debate in Historical Perspective, spent part of their quarter editing immigration-related articles on Wikipedia. The site is among the most-visited, and a frequent stop for students writing term papers even if professors disapprove. The Wikimedia Foundation has a long-running campaign to diversify the editor base of Wikipedia, […]

More Labor Press Data

Following up on the 1925 American Labor Press Directory data set, I’ve worked up a set from the 1940 volume of the same title. Unlike it’s predecessor, the 1940 volume reflects the mainstream status of the labor movement. It was compiled through a WPA project directed by labor economist John R. Commons at the University […]

Thick Networks

In this next series of images I’ve shifted the emphasis from the relationship between people and organizations to the links that people share by virtue of belonging to the same organizations. In the former case, both people and organizations are nodes of the network connected by lines (edges). In the latter case, only people are […]

Mapping the Labor Press

I recently discovered the 1925 American Labor Press Directory, compiled by the same crew that put together the Labor Who’s Who. Luckily, the press directory (ALPD) is much easier to convert to data. There is less information in each entry, and the entries are more regular. Craig Messner at the Center for Digital Humanities did […]

Pix: Learning from the Past to Change the Future

We had an amazing evening last Thursday as folks from the labor movement, politics, and academia came together to listen to a panel of veteran activists, and celebrate the donation of the USWW papers to the UCLA library. Here are a few highlights…