A HUGE Detour

My milieu work took longer tban expected. When about completed, I received notification that my paper proposal for ESSHA had been accepted. It was, however, one of two accepted papers that the organizers had placed within an already-prepared prepared pair of sessions created by a team working on progressive politics in the first half of the 19th century. I was contacted by the panel organizers and asked if I could make my paper fit with these. I thought about it a week and decided that I could make adjustments. I underestimated the extent of these.

I based my decision on the expectation that I could make a quick return to Oldenburg in the fall. The tickets were purchased, files were ordered up. Come August, my left knee began regularly collapsing when I walked. When questioned about whether it would hold up in Germany, I decided that perhaps it would not and cancelled my tickets. I felt confident that I could make good the archival deficit. Ten weeks on, I am not confident that i can achieve what I set out to do.

I began my reoriented paper trying out a series of hypotheses. Sadly, they do not seem to have worked out. I will discuss these in my next post.

An exciting discovery

I am currently breaking my voting data down into milieu - Conservative, Catholic, Liberal, Socialist - as part of my work on Theodor Tantzen and the German Democrats. Temporally and intellectually consuming. I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to determine where to place the miniature splinter parties that collected votes, especially in the second half of the 1920s. 38 separate parties listed on the electors ballots! Press voices were apoplectic.

Along the way, I uncovered new polling place information the increases the accuracy of my data. One of the questions plaguing me has been the vast size of the polling places in southern Oldenburg 1. It seemed irrational that my polling places (Westerstede, Edewicht, Zwischenahn and Apen) were so large. Yesterday, reading an online PDF of Der Ämmerländer, available through the Landesbibliothek Oldenburg, I found that each of the four Ämter were divided into more realistically sized polling places. I was able to add 18 new places. In this way I can properly isolate the four larger Amt seats from their surrounding countryside. Sadly, only the 1919 issues of the newspaper are available online. I will need to return to Oldenburg. Boohoo.

Data Spreadsheet finally updated; GIS working

Mid-February, ir looked like I was ready to use my data on my project on Theodor Tantzen and the German Democrats. Right On examination, I founds that some of my data was incomplete, particularly for the districts around the city of Oldenburg. I also compiled a list of all my missing results and diligently went back through the copies that i had made of polling place results. I was really assisted in this by PDFs of different Oldenburg newspapers published online by the Landesbibliothek Oldenburg (thanks!) I have described this process and some of the changes that I have made to my map and data on this site under "Current Projects".

One new matter. QGIS has been running quite slowly. I have learned that I can make it rune more smoothly if I correct the projects geometries. The checked geometries feature indicated that I had nearly 12,000 incorrect geometries. When I used the "fix" function, one error would be "fixed" while more would appear. I have begun to corrected this problem by systematically deleing individual polygons and creating new ones using a different method. What little I have been able to do, indicates that this will speed thing up considerably. I hgave also decided to experiment with new formats, i.e, SpatiaLite, PostGIS, as time permits.