Bahnu, Adam, Lucas, Caitlin, and HannaLore

We researched Civil War Soldier Databases and looked at the different information easily accessible data.  Looking at what information was available, we ended up having a lot of questions.  How does recruitment age change compared to desertion age?  Can you ask the similar questions of confederates as you do to the questions of the union?  After looking at a relational database, what are the common factors, solely the soldier’s names?  How are they building the soldier’s stories?  Can this information about the individual’s be used to reconstruct trends and patterns among the cities, states, counties… While looking through corresponding data throughout the website, we realize there is a great need to incorporate data on to the same graph in order to quantitatively and qualatatively compare the information.  The axes must be rethought, as five month increments can be deceiving.  The other axis reads “experience value” which brings a lot into question.  What happened at the peaks and lows in the historical sense? We would like to compare these trends to historically significant events.  In essence, we want to qualify the quantitative data given us on the site in order to make sense of it all.    Some other ideas we had involved graphically representing the information on a map of distribution and cities versus the country, as well creating bar graphs that explain human input into the war and human output out of the war (in terms of how they entered and exited the war).