Analysis

To demonstrate how this CollectionBuilder site can be used as a database for other digital projects, I decided to test a series of network analyses on Gephi. I wanted to explore how often soldiers reference one another in their texts, so I built various graphs in Gephi to see the trends. In order to provide a better visual, I denoted the former Union soldiers in blue, former Confederates in gray, and unaffiliated soldiers in brown. In each diagram, the arrows point from the author of the text towards the subject of the reference.

Who did the most referencing?

Looking at this graph, we can see that Charles Chaille-Long references the most soldiers in his text, My Life in Four Continents, followed by William McEntyre Dye in Moslem Egypt and Christian Abyssinia, and William Wing Loring, Richard Henry Savage, and Raleigh Edward Colston in various texts. Long, Loring, Dye seem to reference each other quite frequently, placing them at the dense center of the diagram. Savage, though he references them, is not mentioned very often by these central figures, and thus is isolated at the top. Soldiers on the fringe of the diagram did not produce any written work and are only referenced in singular instances by the other soldiers, perhaps suggesting that they either spent little time in Egypt or that they took on smaller roles.

Who was referenced the most?

This graph is positioned in the exact layout as above, except this time, I focused on who was the subject of the references. The most surprising part of this graph is that some of the most referenced soldiers like Henry Hopkins Sibley and Henry Goslee Prout did not produce any published work. I think that two situations could explain this: One is that certain soldiers were famous amongst the group of 48 and were well-known before serving in Egypt. This is true of Sibley, who was a famous Confederate General and who invented a military tent that was widely used in the Civil War. Second is that some soldiers happened to be involved with a variety of activities in Egypt, like Prout, who aided in the exploration of central Africa and was present for many discoveries there. Interestingly, both Prout and Alexander Macomb Mason were part of this exploration, and both have similarly-sized circles. One statistic that could be studied in the future is the appearance of soliders in texts along with their roles in the Egyptian Army.