In this weeks blog post, we used google fusion tables and we had to read a story to find the connections of characters and occupations. We then used this data from an Excel sheet to convert it on to the google fusion tables and there a map of connections was made. This network graph illuminates the different ways that characters and different occupations have come together to make certain comparisons. I thought this was very interesting because it made it visually very easy to see how things that seem like they would have no comparison, come together to have similarities. Even as the creator, I knew there were going to be some similarities but with this network graph, it was spread out and made it a lot easier to group similar information and it made it easier to now draw conclusions from information. This can be very helpful in my groups project because we have a lot of information of the inmates in the Eastern State Penitentiary and with google fusion tables, this makes it possible to see what these inmates have in common and we can also see some of the outliers that come with the information. My group is focusing on looking into if different races that commit the same crime, if their sentencing time is different and I think by using this tool we can draw better conclusions and we can see if our hypothesis and questions are true or false. The limitations that I noticed that might arise while using this utility is that initially finding how to group the characters was a little tricky. It was also a little difficult to know what was important information to add and what information we can exclude. I think it is important to know what you want to draw from this information and then from there we can try to see what we want to exclude and what we want to add. I can see this being very helpful for my groups research because we need a tool where we can draw conclusions from grouping and gathering information. I know that my group can hopefully obtain and utilize this tool to see where the difficulty was from all of these inmates and we can conclude information to make a good conclusion and come to a consensus. There aren’t too many other limitations that I have noticed and therefore I hope my group can use these tables.
