On April 2, 2024, the Travelers Lab had the honor of presenting to esteemed professors and members of the College of Letters (COL) and QAC departments. Our presentation centered on summarizing the CDER project, providing an opportunity to showcase our research achievements and outline our future objectives.
Olivia began with an overview of the project and its previous iterations, and discussed the issues and challenges with the ways that the data was initially presented, focusing on the geographical inaccuracies and the lack of readability for a wide audience. Will provided context for what Nodegoat is, a relational database that allows for temporal and spatial connections between objects.
To show how this works for the CDER project, a screen recording of last semester’s data model was played. Moving on to the data itself, Zaray pointed out how this project is, at this point in time, creating data from documents and other databases that aren’t necessarily quantifiable in a table. We are also approaching the data input process from a historical perspective, focusing on what historians would be interested in from each category of data. Ruishi then spoke about how we see connections between the data within nodegoat, and showed this [see below] screenshot of the connection visualizer in nodegoat.

To conclude the presentation, Alex explained the interactions between history and data collection, noting that one of the goals of this project is to create a database that can serve as a model for data usage in a historical context and presentation, and Daniel Feldman, part of the Chronicles: Text to Data project team, alongside Arla Hoxha, Yinka Vaughn, and Diana Tran, provided a comprehensive update on their ongoing project. He discussed their utilization of ArcGIS for analyzin g historical events by extracting information from textual references such as events, individuals, and chronicles.
By Olivia Keyes
Class of 2025