This semester, I’m taking my very last course in the PhD program–the Doctoral Research Seminar. The purpose of the course is to research and write a substantial paper related to our dissertations. I’ve chosen to explore the circumstances of capital cases involving women in Virginia in the 1850s. As seen in this graph, my research…
Category: PhD
An Exploration of Gender, Society, and Law in America
This fall, I’ll be working with Dr. Sharon Leon to finish my minor field on gender, law, and society in America. In the spirit of open scholarly communication, I thought it prudent to share my initial thoughts on this minor field, what I will be reading, and what I hope to accomplish. I will be…
Great Expectations
I had partial success with my mapping project this weekend. I had originally planned to map each state with little popup boxes showing details on the numbers for each state. It turns out that I greatly underestimated both my skills with JSON files and the Google APIv3 for maps. But let me back up. I…
Averting Distraction and Thinking Ahead
Sometimes you aren’t as productive as you’d like to be. Fred warned us that this class might do that, so I’m taking it as part of the territory. This week I ignored the urge to scrap my entire site and rebuild it using the fancy new tools in my toolkit. I admit that redesigning websites…
Getting Answers from Your Data
My assignment this week was was to run the queries I “designed” last week. (*I am, of course, using the term “design” very loosely, as last week was full of hand wringing and general PHP consternation.) This week, I ran 4 total queries. I am pretty happy with how they turned out: Total numbers of…
Asking Questions of Your Data
Now that my data is normalized and I have a good idea of what is contained in my database, it’s time to start asking questions of my data. What do I want to know? Which queries are only for me? Which would I like to embed into a web page? While they don’t seem like…