Building the Portuguese Empire in the 19th Century

CORE Admin
View of the Object 'Casa do comando do reino de Lautém' in the Type 'Works'.
This projects seeks to understand the Colonial Public Works as a system of mobility, in which heterogeneous actors interact and shape one another in different ways.
Alice Santiago Faria (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

I was looking for and experimenting network analysis software and hadn’t made up my mind – one of my problems was that no software seemed to respond to what I wanted to do and I had to shape my data and my questions to it – when I come across nodegoat.

I’m trying to explore a method of understanding the Colonial Public Works as a system of mobility, in which heterogeneous actors interact and shape one another in different ways, changing the built environment across geographies. So, one of my problems was that I wanted to work with a large heterogeneous dataset and to have control of the data. nodegoat was a perfect answer to my problems since is an object-oriented software and can be used to design your own datasets with great liberty. Moreover, it combines a set of unique possibilities that are really helpful for my work: the analysis of relations with spatial and chronological contextualization; it allows one to move smoothly from a micro (individual) to macro scale (collective) and back; it is possible to produce different types of analysis.

Furthermore, it is designed thinking of historical data - therefore, incomplete data is not a big problem - and it allows linking each piece of data (in many types, typical historical references but also linking data from the web, to images, etc. to its source, maintaining the “control” I was looking for.

This project has been funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia through national funds from Ministério da Educação e Ciência.

Project website: buildingtheportugueseempire.org

Geographic visualisation of all the Objects in the Type 'Person', including the Sub-Objects 'Birth', 'Death', 'Education', 'Post', and 'Travels'.