Chris "no cap-" os Website

In recent class discussions and through hours of code writing worksheets, I can confidently say that I learned more about coding in r this past week than I have all semester. Whether it be the pressure of the final project or just the normal end of module grind, I was able to really spend a lot of time working through code script and grasping the language used in r. The reason for this sudden spurt of knowledge, I believe, is stemming from the difficulty of the recent code writing worksheets. Unlike the first few, if you did not firmly understand the material that was covered in the videos, it was not possible to complete some of the sections. Now that the final project is approaching, we are required to use some of the techniques which we have learned so far in the semester and report our observations for our chosen topic. For my project specifically, I will be utilizing regression analysis, multinomial regressions, and most likely a heat map to visually display my results. Intrinsic in this process, I must understand how I am going to extract the data I am searching for, from the data set I am working with. For example, I know that in order for me to properly run a multinomial regression(meaning multi-binary x=0,y=1,z=3) I must first organize my data so that we are cross regressing specifically according to the different town locations of the donors. If I were to run a basic binary regression or chi squared test, my results would be skewed because not all town areas would be able to be represented in the results. In economics, we must be very precise when deciding which sort of analysis we want to run. 

Reading which are being considered as my partner and I work through the final project are racial capitalism, data cleaning, and data feminism. Our project is tied to racial capitalism because we are focusing on where much of the money from donations originated from. In this research, I intend to focus on hotspot areas of large donations. One, to correlate wealthy areas of Maine with wealthy donors; and to also research the history of the area to explain why this wealth has ended up there. Also within this scope, if there are certain donors, or multiple donors of the same family, it would be important to research how the family gained their wealth in such an exploitive era in American history. For data cleaning, we are solely focused on extracting the data which we are using for our empirical work, not as to have omitted variable bias in our results, but because some of the other data recorded is not relevant for specific purposes/models. In terms of data feminism, a trend we notice when focusing on families of donors in our data set iis often, the mother(assumption) does not have the first name listed. There is a portion of the data that reflects female names as “Mrs.”, when we all know it was only recorded as such because in this time period, the first name of the woman was not important, so as long as the man of the household’s name was attached. This major difference from modern day business receipts is something that we must consider when working through our data, and also we analyze the significance of our results.

Originally I wanted to address the issue of how Bates College was utilizing the money they were receiving from donations at the time, and where exactly they put the money to use in the early stages of the institution. After reflecting on how I want to exactly extract this information, I came to the conclusion that there could be many issues that come along with this down the road. The main issue being lack of data on how the money was spent and where it went, specifically being that Bates just does not have the archives for information like this. One of the comments for my previous posts suggests that “try to get at the connection between Bates’s use of funds and the influence of outside forces (the donors)” and to research “the largest donations and then research the people who provided those donations”. This comment is extremely helpful because it eliminates the issue I had previously of their being lack of data, because I can simply use the data we are already sifting through with the worksheets. Also, I feel this is a more narrow focus on a single piece of information that can actually help us get a sense of what kinds of people were making donations to the school. Up to this point we have only been talking about those associated with slavery, but who else could be on the list?

Clearly, the result of the Chi square test has resulted in a statistically inaccurate result, given the framework for our data. Right now, my issue is fixing a problem in the for loop associated with the big_money column of my data series, mss_donors. I am trying to produce a TRUE FALSE vector in this column with respect to the “amount” column in the same row. If the amount of the donation is above $20, the big_money column shows TRUE, and if less FALSE. By comparing this and the location of those donated, we can determine if there is a relationship between where people are from, and how much they donate; which we could then assume that these towns which have higher donations are more likely to be wealthier areas of the state. I am going to fix this issue ASAP and will update this post with the corrected code and resulting p-values. The ones displayed are off and we know why, however after attempting to find the solution for nearly 4 hours now(off and on), I am going to get some shut eye and hope I find the solution in my sleep.

The question my final project will answer is a central focus surrounding the economic aspect of the data series we have been combing through, throughout the module. So far, we have been focusing on who has donated, how much they have donated, and where they are from. Questions I want to consider and believe are logical and reasonable given the circumstances of our class, are deeper considerations of the monetary history of Bates College. The reason this data can be valuable to us is because it would give us more information about how the money was utilized and where the college decided to invest its resources, especially early on, that allowed it to survive as long as it has. With this new series of information and data we can now ask questions that we were unable to ask before; one, because we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and two, we have a more precise and comprehensive record of the transactional history.

The data required to fulfill these proposed questions are more records of donations, or if there is a list from the school archive of total donations received including tuition. Essentially, the first step would be to come up with, as accurately as we can given current technological restrictions of how much money Bates College had in its wallet. This step can be achieved but will most likely be the most tedious step because it will involve a lot of recording information and monotonous scanning confirming correct values. The next step would be to figure out how Bates decided to spend the resources and assets they had. How much they had to spend to keep the place running, how much on improvements, financial aid, etc.. This step could be more difficult to pinpoint but even a record of when certain buildings were constructed or purchased by Bates will give us a stronger understanding of how the finances were being handled in the past. 

We could put all of this information into a relational database which accounts for every aspect of our research. Including but not limited to: aspects about donation history, about school finances, and about other transactions and important information regarding Bates. With all of this data in one series we can use R to manipulate the data so that we can visually see the information the data is trying to reflect, or to further analyze the data and give us a more accurate result on specific questions. 

For this specific instance, we can use the data to find answers to questions such as how much money was invested in financial aid, how much of this financial aid was given to people of low income, and further on. However, we can also use this to find more descriptive statistics about where the school’s interests lied in the early stages of Bates College. By noticing trends of where money was invested we can further dictate whether or not the schools interests, in terms of their own actions, exceed precedent over the interests of others; others, regarding any third party recipient of any action taken by or for the benefit of Bates College.

In our deeper delve into the Maine State Seminary data we were forced to utilize more complex functions in R, in order to extract and manipulate the data and turn it into something we can use as a resource to represent the missing voices from those of the past. Some of the more unfamiliar commands that we used this week was my first ever interaction with these functions while using R. My initial sense when we began using these commands early in the week was that the coding aspect of this would be much more meticulous and detailed in terms of code writing; because any sort of inefficiency while attempting to compute extremely specific types of data will result in a drastically inaccurate result. 

While working with the data in class and throughout the worksheet, something that stuck out to me was how most donations to Bates, specifically, come from mostly the same few towns as well as coming from multiple members of the same family. This shouldn’t have really surprised me but it more caught me off guard because I was not necessarily thinking critically beforehand of where I expect Bates to have gotten their money from. This is honestly a trend similar to how most schools get their money today. Large donations from wealthy families who have personal interests in the school(whether it be alumnus or children) from mostly affluent towns. 

#plotting the “day” and “amount” columns of donors variable on a scatter plot, the end is just for chart labeling

plot(donors$Day, donors$Amount, main=”Donations dependent of Day”, xlab=”Day of Month”, ylab=”Amount of Donation”)

In our data of the Maine State Seminary, there was only one date in the top left corner of the pdf. Our assumption was that if there was a donation made on another date, it would have been marked on the invoice. With this knowledge now, it can be assumed that these donations could have been made at a fundraising event, given that there is only one recorded date, there are multiple members of the same family donating smaller amounts, and many of the towns where the people lived are in close proximity to each other.

Due to this slight misrepresentation in the data, our analysis between the correlation of day and donation amount is insignificant because every single donation in the data is recorded on the same date. 

Other attributes I think would be worth the time to delve into regarding data with the Maine State Seminary are other relationships between people who have donated money to Bates; but with more of a central focus on how Bates has spent this money(if we even have data on that). With the foundation from our work in the previous few weeks, we can pull out a lot of information by dissecting this data. If we can determine where Bates used the donation money, we can then further decide for ourselves if Bates ended up using the money for an overall benefit(while also taking into account the fact we are not focusing on who the money came from).

This week we continued our conversation of where Bates College really got the money from their early donations. From deep and conductive conversation we now, more than previously, realize that the idea of Bates College as an abolitionist institution continues to stray further from the truth, especially when we consider this wealth in terms of racial capitalism. The definition of racial capitalism that makes the most sense to me, especially in the specific instance of our very own Bates College, is wealth or capital gained by one party, by the stolen labor and stolen work of another party with no compensation. Now, this is obviously an extremely broad definition, but in relevant terms; Bates College was given $200,000 worth of stolen labor and capital, indirectly. Does that make it morally acceptable for Bates College to then take that money, and use it for their own benefit? 

We spent one of our out of the classroom days working with our randomly assigned partner on another coding worksheet on the ED platform, using R to help solve some of the questions. The data we were using was an old list of the size of cotton bales on a shipment. There were roughly 70 numbers recorded on the document, which my partner and I had to hand type each individual bale weight and save it as a variable we called bale_weight. After we had all the information on bale weigh that we needed to progress, we began answering the questions on the worksheet. The objective of the worksheet was to obviously wokr on our coding skills with R, but also put into perspective the insane impact, strictly economically speaking, slavery had on how early wealth was earned and distributed. Fairly? Of course not. 

The variable stolenlabormoney represents the amount of money per day of stolen labor money from enslaved people(not including fees associated w/ cotton). We calculated this variable from only a list of bale weights by 150, to have our new values represent the number of days that were stolen from enslaved people to pick cotton. We called this new variable stolenlabordays ← baleweight/150. This histogram shows us clearly that the average bale stole on average 3.5 days from the enslaved worker. PER BALE! On our invoice alone there were over 70 bales. Our final variable, stolenlabormoney, is the baleweight multiplied by .10 because 10 cents was our assumption for the price of cotton at the time. This variable tells us the amount of money made off of stolen labor of enslaved people. We see from the histogram the number of bales that produced a certain amount of profit.

Fortunately for me I do have some prior experience in both coding( from previous courses taken at Bates and from prior courses taken in high school) as well and critical thinking and thought provocation surrounding ideas about how technology is a reflection of our society and our society’s past. In terms of strict coding, I have never used the type of code we are using this semester so that will be a new challenge for me but I do believe that working with other students to help sharpen up some of the technical skills will be beneficial(also not to mention the fact that this is now one of only two classes taken in this module). 

Technology has allowed people across the globe to access information which would have otherwise been impossible to obtain in previous years. Having the ability to do this is extremely valuable because it can help us find new solutions to modern problems. It also allows us to access information of the past, and thus, discover more about where we came from in terms of our country, our industrialization growth, and our family history. While, again, valuable; it has also caused us, the people, some disturbing facts about our past. And this has been especially true in our discussion about how Bates College grew into the institution it is today. From the advanced technology of being able to first preserve artifacts from the past, and second to be able to put this piece of information on the computer for anyone to access, we were able to obtain a receipt from Benjamin Bates from when he purchased over six thousand dollars(equivalent to a quarter million dollar purchase in today’s terms) of cotton from a slave owned farm in Louisiana, for his factories here in Lewiston. This disturbing, yet insightful, information allowed us to delve deep into conversation about our institutions’ not so innocent past.  

Before this document was presented in front of us, I had always envisioned Bates College as an institution that was proactively anti-slavery since its founding. Or at least that’s what was portrayed in the history of the school was by the marketing team. As we know, there is always more than meets the surface of this story. To say that Bates College supported slavery in its early years is not true. But, to say Bates College turned their head when Benjamin Bates offered up a massive donation in order to get the school started… IS true. With this new information, the next question is, what is the next step? And this is where I feel conflicted. On one side I understand why Bates College claims our institution has always been an abolitionist college. Because no one who worked for the school technically had any slaves, and also, it is a great marketing point and at the end of the day in today’s world Bates College is… a business. That being said I am disappointed in the school with the dishonesty towards prospective students and parents(who WE used to be not long ago!), which begs the question, what else am I being misinformed about?

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