My digital humanities project consisted of mapping the Carpatho-Rusyn villages in Slovakia to discover more information and find common trends between the different villages.
Aim: The aim of my project was to examine the location of the villages in what is today Slovakia, where the Carpatho-Rusyns have historically lived for centuries, and where they continue to live today. I chose this particular focus because of the personal connection I have with the topic. My paternal grandfather’s ancestors were Carpatho-Rusyns and came to the United States from three of the villages that I looked at. I did narrow the focus of my project as I began to gather the data on the villages. Originally I was planning to look at all of the villages in what are today the countries of Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. I found that there are over six hundred Carpatho-Rusyn villages located across these three countries. I decided to select around one hundred villages from Slovakia for two reasons. First I have a personal connection to the villages in Slovakia as that is where my ancestors came from, and second selected one hundred villages would be much more manageable for this project than looking at over six hundred different villages. I want to not only find out more about the specific villages that my ancestors came from, and also discover some common trends between the different villages.
Sources and Software: The sources I used for my project were two lists of Carpatho-Rusyn villages compiled by Carpatho-Rusyn Knowledge Base and The Carpathian Connection, two websites that provide resources and support for individuals doing research on the Carpatho-Rusyn people. The software that I used for completeing the project was Microsoft Excel and Kepler.gl. I decided that the best way to compare the different villages was through creating a data sheet in Microsoft Excel and uploading it to the mapping software Kepler.gl. I choose Kepler.gl because it allows for the creation of a variety of different map types that can analyze relationships contained in the different categories that my data set contained, and using mapping software made sense since my data concerned villages with fixed geographic points.
Problems: Throughout the process of working on my project, there were a number of issues that I had to address. The first issue I confronted was having to narrow the focus of my project. I quickly decided to narrow my focus from looking at all of the Carpatho-Rusyn villages in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, to just looking at the villages in what is today Slovakia. The main reason that I decided to narrow my focus was practicality. Unfortunately I did not have enough time to gather the data on all six hundred villages into one data set, so I decided to focus instead on a much more manageable data set of one hundred and six villages located in what is today Slovakia. The other problems I had with completing my project came when I was creating the maps in Kepler.gl. I wanted to create two maps that visualized the locations of the former counties in the Kingdom of Hungary and the current districts of Slovakia. I ended up discovering that the best way to display this data on maps was to go into the label feature and selected Historical County in the Kingdom of Hungary and Current District of Slovakia to display this data. The other major problem I encountered in using Kepler.gl was creating the time map. This ultimately proved to be the most difficult part of the project. I wanted to create a time map of when the villages were founded or first mentioned in written sources. When I first went to create a time map by adding the filter I found that it would not display the time graph on the map. After trying to create the time map multiple times, I went back and looked at the data sheet we used when mapping the WPA Slave Narrative interviews in Alabama. After looking at this data sheet I came to the realization that I did not have the dates in my data sheet in the correct format. I could not create a time map in Kepler.gl with just a year, I needed to include a month, date, and time for the founding dates of each villages. After going through my data sheet and adding a date of 01-01 and a time of T00:00:00Z I was able to finally create a time map that displayed when the villages were established or first mentioned in written sources.
Discoveries from Sources: There were a few different facts that I discovered about my sources from creating maps in Kepler.gl. From the five maps I created for my project, I was able to learn a few different things about the one hundred and six Carpatho-Rusyn villages that I examined. First, I discovered that the villages were scattered across the entire Prešov region of Slovakia, and a few of the villages were found in the northern Košice region. Second, I found that the highest density of villages could actually be found in the northern Prešov region close to the Slovak-Polish boarder. Next, the time map I created revealed that the period between 1397 and 1422 saw the largest amount of villages either being established or first mentioned in written sources. Finally, I discovered that the largest amount of villages were located in the historic Hungarian counties of Saros and Zemplen and the current Slovak districts of Stará Ľubovňa, Svidník, and Bardejov.
Project URL: http://andrewhutsko.org/uncategorized/carpatho-rusyn-villages-in-slovakia/
