Historical – Digital Maps, Space and Place

October 23, 2014

Memory Box

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For alumni and current students, the campus of Davidson College holds many memories, and, for my final project, I would like to present those memories and thoughts on a map of campus. As suggested in the “Ten rules for humanities scholars new to project management,” it is important when starting any creative process to ask, “What contribution/important intervention is this project making?” In mapping the memories of Davidson College campus, I aim to archive the student experience and how that has changed overtime–including positive and negative, social and academic experiences. Having locational memories of Davidson’s buildings could potentially inform administrative decisions about the necessity of the current slue of renovations and building projects on campus, inform the college about the mental health of its students, highlight current and historic problem areas on campus, or merely be an interesting record of the time spent at Davidson.

The culmination of this project is an interactive website (or mobile app) that will allow users to zoom and tag places on campus and anonymously insert memories. In addition to engaging current students to insert their memories, I aim to contact alumni or use the resources in the Davidson Library archives to bring in a historical perspective on what students used to do and what has happened on campus. The memories presented on the website will entirely depend on what users bring to the site: memories of going out during Frolics or memories of studying during finals. Potentially, as Nedra Reynolds found in “Maps of the Everyday: Habitual Pathways and Contested Places,” user input may reveal spatial boundaries between certain groups on campus, similar to the Leeds students who were afraid to walk through certain parks or neighborhoods or the anonymous interface may serve as a sounding board for current issues (similar to YikYak). Ultimately, my role in the project will be to create a design that is easily accessible and fun to use.

The first and most important step in the methodology for creating the website will be to decide which tool could create a simple and clean design for users. Second, I will ask people to post memories to the map and to share the website in order to gather data and create as holistic of a picture of Davidson as possible. Thus, as I move forward, I will need to keep the user of the website in mind, since user input is the crux of my project. Although I will be working alone on this project, I think that some of the goals outlined by Stan Ruecker and Milena Radzikowska in “The Iterative Design of a Project Charter for Interdisciplinary Research” are applicable to my own project. Specifically, their goal to “move forward at a steady pace” is an admirable goal for any project; however, I believe it is important to keep in mind, as they do, that creative projects can often pass through many phases before the final version and creativity should not be hindered by deadlines. As I mentioned above, the user will be the critical component of this project and I will need to test and revise the interface of the website in order for design a website that not only works but also inspires people to use it.

As I develop the website, I may find that there are limitations to what I can achieve. For example, in many in-class discussions, the topic of exclusion has been a primary focus–who has access to the map, whose view does it represent, are maps accurately representing the truth? In making a repository of memories of the Davidson College campus, I may also have this bias and may have to limit which memories can be included. For example, while Chambers should obviously be included on the map, I may not be able to include places that are important for certain groups, such as the backstage of the theatre or the varsity athlete’s weight room. I also may not be able to include places that are not marked by physical structures. This limitation is summarized by Henri LeFebvre, who raises the question about the relative importance of the built versus the natural environment in a landscape–i.e. are the freshman dorms more important than the tree behind Commons?

In conclusion, through Omeka or a mobile app, I aim to design a map that serves as a memory box for Davidson College that will not only serve as diary of the student body, but may also reveal something new about the current situation or history of campus.

October 15, 2014

Burning Down Davidson

In this exhibit, I use Heganoo, which advertises itself as a “personalized interactive mobile map” to create a story about the fires that have occurred on Davidson College’s campus. Although Heganoo is limited in terms of overlaying historical images and maps on to current day scenes and creating a data-thick map, it is a useful tool to provide spatial context to a story that has an ordered plot. As can been seen below, the basic Heganoo event map provides numbered locations for a storyline:

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 7.18.56 PM — Heganoo Basic Event Map

I think that story lines are Heganoos speciality. Some of the alternatives to Heganoo are Neatline, which specializes in compiling information and allowing the user to explore independently, and History Pin, which makes historical comparisons easy by overlaying historical images onto Google Maps. Heganoo does not incorporate ambiguity or allow user interaction, which Bethany Nowviskie considers to be important attributes of Neatline. Instead, similar to Charles Cunningham’s “21 Steps,” Heganoo guides the user along a constructed story path and compartmentalizes information in order for it to be easily understood.

Not only could the stories of Davidson fires be told using another mapping tool, they could also have been told without maps altogether. However, as Farman argues in his article, “Site-Specificity, Pervasive Computing and the Reading Interface,” there is an importance in site-specificity and including the locations of the fires adds another dimension to the experience of the stories. In my exhibit, in addition to learning the details of each fire and some specifics about each building, knowing the location of each building allows the user to get a better sense of campus. For example, the location of older fires allows the user to get a sense of the old campus and the newer fire in Belk informs the user about how the college expanded down the hill. Additionally, the map enables the user to locate other buildings on campus, such as the church from which people ran to save the burning Watts dormitory.

In conclusion, I feel that Heganoo is the best application for presenting project similar to the exhibit I created that features the locations and stories about burning down Davidson College.

October 3, 2014

QGIS: The Good and The Bad

For those who have the know-how on using it effectively (or the patience to figure it out), QGIS can be an extraordinarily useful tool for combining layers of data, geographic information, and images. Although the map below presents a clean, simple combination of all three, the process in making it was by no means easy.

In the example below, the base layer is geographic data contained in the shape files of buildings in Mecklenburg County (marked Davidson_buildings on the legend) to which I have added a georeferenced map of Davidson College’s campus dating from 1974. These two layers are interesting juxtapositions in of themselves especially for those who wish to conduct a historical comparison of a certain space. However, in this example, the map stretches beyond mere historical comparison and the combination of building shape files and the map of Davidson College’s campus becomes the background for the shape file data on the number of international students’ currently living in the dorms.

PA #3 Final MAP — QGIS Output Map: Background features a 1974 map of Davidson College campus. Data displays the number of international students’ housed in dorm.

While this QGIS map does not present a unique or insightful comment about the history of Davidson College or the composition of its student body, the map does exhibit the capabilities of the QGIS software and also provides insight into the difficulties that can arise when using this tool.

First, using QGIS, the user can georeference (i.e. embed geographic data points in the image) images and the latitude and longitude lines to align images, shape files and data. In the map above, I aligned the 1974 map of Davidson College visually with the building shape files; however, the latitude and longitude points were useful it that they connected the location of buildings with the data about dorms. Second, I combined the geographic information of the dorm data with the previous layers and formed a new shape file layer that is seen in the green/blue tinged dorms. Here, the shade of the color of the building represents how densely each dorm is populated with international students. As can be seen on the legend, the more international students living the dorm, the darker the shade; thus, the viewer is easily able to see that Sentelle has the most international students.

Although I stumbled a few times in the process of getting to this finished product (as can been seen in the wonky orientation of Knox’s polygon shape file and the frustrated file name “Output Hopeful”), the ultimate outcome is a clean, visually simplistic representation of both historical and numerical data and a testament to the useful possibilities of QGIS.

October 2, 2014

Assigning Value to Davidson Buildings

As you walk around the main quad of Davidson College it’s hard to distinguish which buildings are old, and which are new. The continuity of the architecture, with red bricks and white facing, gives the college a consistently quaint feel. Although it seems like each building has been here from the beginning, GIS can help determine which buildings actually have historical value, and which do not. Because historical value isn’t the only measure of value, I have also included my own personal value in this analysis (measured by weather or not I have been to the building).

To measure value I have georeferenced a map of Davidson College in 1915 with Mecklenburg county buildings data. I then clipped the shape file so only Davidson buildings were included. I assigned each building a value from 1-4 depending on their combined historical and personal value. Buildings with a value of 4 have been there since 1915 and I have visited them. Buildings with a value of 3 have not been there since 1915 but I have visited them. Buildings with a value of 2 have been there since 1915 and I have not visited them. Finally, buildings with a value of 1 have not been there since 1915 and I have not visited them.

The above image shows the effectiveness of Davidson College planning. Of all of the buildings, only two have no historical value or value to me. Although I do not accurately represent all Davidson Students, I have been here for four years, so hopefully visited more buildings than not. Using GIS I show that the main campus of Davidson College is highly populated and contains many buildings with high levels of value. It would be interesting to compare this map to a similar map of the newly acquired areas of Davidson’s campus. It would also be interesting to map these measures of value of different students involved in different areas around campus. These maps might show us weather or not Davidson is designed effectively for the diversity of students. The historical map demonstrates how Davidson has managed to keep numerous buildings that are frequently visited (renovated or not) for 100 years.

Here is the map with google maps as a background

September 26, 2014

The Benefits of Warped Maps – Using MapTiler to Geocode

Attempt 1: https://33d8b2c24eb605307ea0635c48868382a9c76f54.googledrive.com/host/0B3qWZoVoqkj0OTlOaGJJb0ZSNjg/

**for attempt 1 the map doesn’t show the first time but if you reload the page it usually shows.

Attempt 2:

https://fde27f0d66c1f67b7b15ffe8436a7c6284d9733d.googledrive.com/host/0B3qWZoVoqkj0bjRJMkxzNHNoOWM/

Geocoding this map using MapTiler demonstrated a couple of challenges of map geocoding. In class we discussed the overwhelming amount of map data available for urban places, and the underwhelming amount available for rural ones. My geocoding experience presents tangible evidence of this phenomena. In my first attempt of geocoding this historical map of Davidson College and its surrounding areas the historical map fit nicely in the areas of Davidson with roads and buildings (bottom right), but was warped tremendously in the surrounding natural areas (at the top). Although Davidson College is not quite an urban center, the differences between the inhabited and uninhabited areas are striking. Without roads or buildings it is very hard to geocode a map. It took me a second try to guess where areas in the historical map corresponded to google maps for the northern part of Davidson’s property, and still my second attempt is not quite perfect. While this small experiment shows that the differences in information for rural versus urban landscapes is quite stark, it also shows that historical mapping processes can inform current map makers of the past human-environment relationships.

Using geocoding as a tool, it would be interesting to measure the “warpness” of historical maps as Davidson college expands into nature. By mapping a series of historical maps on a current google map and viewing the areas being warped, one could distinguish the areas in which the College expands into the surrounding natural area. Do they map the natural areas or leave them sparse? How quickly does the college expand its infrastructure? Is there a way to remove all of the warp in these historical maps? These results could show not only the expansion of the college, but also the fluctuations of valued spaces.

What at first seemed to be a mistake, might just demonstrate one of the benefits of geocoding techniques. By showing warp, MapTiler allows for map makers to develop certain theories about historical maps – in this case about Davidson College’s relationship with the surrounding land.