Widespread Witnesses to the Morant Bay Rebellion
For the final project of my ENG 470 course, I chose to explore geographical data that aimed to answer these two questions:
How widespread was the violence resulting from the Morant Bay Rebellion?”
“In which places were people most affected/exposed to the violence?”
I felt that these questions were important to examine from a geographical lens because of my own personal struggles with conceptualizing the scope of the rebellion and those involved. I learned about the rebellion as more of a series of events that happened, so rather than understanding how the events related to each other locally, I was only able to understand the overall outcomes.
I chose to use data from the Jamaica Royal Commission Report (JRCR) to examine the above questions. I extracted a portion of the JRCR’s index (part C, specifically), which consisted of a list of all the interviewees in the report that identified being a witness to a violent crime – either flogging or deaths. In addition to the witnesses names, each entry also included the day the witness was interviewed, and some information on either their residence, their occupation, or sometimes both. I chose to extract the residence data from this index portion and run frequency analyses on the data in order to see which locations were mentioned most frequently. I then mapped this data onto two different geographical representations of Jamaica to demonstrate both the overall location frequency and the specifics of each location in a more story-like manner.
The first portion below is mapped through the Knight Lab’s StoryMap JS tool. The first slide should give a brief overview of the project, and then each subsequent slide introduces a location and the frequency at which it was mentioned as a location of residence within the index. For this representation, I chose to exclude locations that were only mentioned once to make the story map less overwhelming and more user-friendly overall. I also had to estimate a few of the locations within the map using latitude and longitude values, so the map may not be exactly geographically accurate. It is, however, the most accurate I could make it with my current abilities and resources.
The following image is an overall representation I created using Microsoft Powerpoint. While I felt that the above representation with Knight Lab’s tool did a relatively good job, I also felt that it didn’t quite allow me to see the overall frequency picture at one time, which is what I originally set out to do. Below, I included all of the locations mentioned except for “Glosset Land” and “Mount Morant” because I was unable to find any indication of where those might be on a map. The key in the top right corner indicates the frequency at which the location was mentioned, and each numbered circle is labeled in the keys at the bottom.
Overall, I felt that these two representations adequately answered my initial questions. While most of the witnesses to the violence were centered around Morant Bay (as I expected), there were still some witnesses that lived further away on Jamaica. This research was exciting and satisfying to work with, and if, in the future, I continue to work with this data and research question, one of my main goals will be to find a digital humanities tool that is able to combine my two representations into one complete form. Additionally, if I had the time and resources to do so, I would love to be able to look more closely through the JRCR to find other indications of witnesses to violence than those just listed in part C of the index.
This was a triumphant end to my coursework in ENG 470, and I am proud of the tools I’ve created.
