For our final Hacking the Humanities project our group elected to research into Jesse James and the Dime Novels written about him.
Jesse James was a notorious outlaw that mainly operated within the Midwest in the mid to late 1800s. The leaders of his gang were mainly him, his brother Frank and Cole Younger. For years they robbed banks, trains, stagecoaches and even fairgrounds. They murdered people in many of these robbings.
The most notorious however of his robbings happened in Northfield Minnesota where he attempted to rob the bank in the small town. His gang failed and the only survivors were him and his brother.
And yet Jesse James is not commonly known as a murderer and failed bank robber but as a robin hood type figure even though he is not known to ever give the money he stole, why is this? The answer: Dime Novels. For years after his death Jesse James legacy was thrown into fame and glory as book after book was written based on his adventures. But how many of these adventures did Jesse James actually?
The process used to make this project was multi-faceted. As a group, we read through Carleton’s archived collection of 22 Jesse James Dime Novels, noting every location that Jesse James visited. We researched where these locations were, doing our best to account for non-existent or vague concepts, and plugging their geographical coordinates into a spreadsheet. Next, we found the coordinates of the non-fictional locations Jesse James visited, using the Paso Robles Historical Society’s data. After that, the information was imported and mapped in ARC-GIS, using a heat map to analyze location likelihood. Then, data was further analyzed in Flourish.
The process used to make this project was multi-faceted. As a group, we read through Carleton’s archived collection of 22 Jesse James Dime Novels, noting every location that Jesse James visited. We researched where these locations were, doing our best to account for non-existent or vague concepts, and plugging their geographical coordinates into a spreadsheet. Next, we found the coordinates of the non-fictional locations Jesse James visited, using the Paso Robles Historical Society’s data. After that, the information was imported and mapped in ARC-GIS, using a heat map to analyze location likelihood. Then, data was further analyzed in Flourish.
