I chose the website ““EVERYTHING ON PAPER WILL BE USED AGAINST ME”: QUANTIFYING KISSINGER”, which is an analysis of the former US secretary of State and National Security Advisor “Henry Kissinger”s private documents, mail, phone calls etc., written by doctoral student Micki Kaufman. This is a politically motivated blog post, and as such there may be bias in some areas if Kaufman is not capable of fully detaching themselves from the raw material.
The site’s homepage starts with a title and a short description of the project’s data, followed by an introductory video and then a few short quotes to express why collecting and presenting this data is a worthwhile and valuable venture. According to the given quotes, Henry Kissinger was extremely protective of his communications and written instructions, stating himself that “Everything on paper will be used against me” which illustrates him as a cautious, perhaps somewhat paranoid individual. This may be a bias by Kaufman to use this quote and highlight this part, but so far there have been no opinions stated which keeps the notion that this blog was made solely to help present and help analyze this important figure of the cold war.
The purpose of the blog as stated in the homepage is to utilize “sophisticated computational techniques” in order to ensure that the “variations of the content of text itself” is measured as opposed to the “economic data”, which is what would happen with traditional archival means. Kaufman therefore believes that a large volume of text and a search engine is not an efficient nor extensively useful technique to storing important historical data. Tabs of the website are listed as: All Posts, Text Analysis Methods, Visualizations, and interactivity. I believe that the “Visualizations” section pertains more to Kaufman’s idea of sophisticated computational techniques than the rest of the blog.
Reading the “All Posts” section of the blog certainly serves to prove Kaufman’s points. Traditional data collection and viewing methods such as laying the raw information bare to see is certainly not pleasing to look at. It is difficult to see the relevance each post has to the blog post as a whole, as well as which posts would heavily relate without manually searching. The “Text Analysis Methods” section of the website serves to explain the analysis and sorting methods of Kaufman. It includes the software used to create the graphs and interactive aspects of the site, and discusses interesting points that Kaufman themself found while creating the blog.
Finally, in my opinion the most important parts of the site are next. In “Visualizations” Kaufman has included force directed graphs, line and bar graphs, and area and stream graphs. This is where Kaufman’s ideas of sophisticated computational techniques can be evaluated. There are multiple graphs and word webs that are based on searching for specific words, dates etc. that are more visually pleasing to the eye than traditional text storage boxes. While some of the graphs are still quite difficult to pull surprising or irregular data from, and some are just too crowded and extensive to read, it certainly seems more intuitive and interesting than traditional methods.
The very last section of the site is the interactive section of the blog, where Kaufman has created static and interactive maps for the viewer to enjoy and study. While overall this is quite an interesting way to explore and discuss historical data, we get to one of the primary setbacks. Truly there is an awesome amount of data presented here, which is to be expected when studying such large and important historical topics. The maps given are quite busy, and require some careful viewing. It is not exceptionally easy to use and likely would take too much time to create meaningful relations with the data, making it an inefficient historical archival and discovery method. It certainly is an interesting topic to explore, rejecting traditional ‘close reading’ methodology, but I do not believe Kaufman makes a strong enough case for it in this example.