Inspired by Dr. Kristine Hildebrandt’s Mapmaking facilitation, I begin to investigate what philosopher and literary critic Katherine McKittrick calls “Demonic Ground,” the negative space that exists within a marked geography (xxiv).  The concept is rooted within the work of Sylvia Wynter, whose essay, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” introduced the construct to analyze the invisible nature of Caliban’s wife within William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. (She is mentioned within the dialogue of the play, but she never appears herself as an actor.) Another way to understand “Demonic Ground” is as a study of the “unvisible” (McKittrick 19), a person, place, construct, or object that one is made aware of, but then by some societal/internal psychological mechanism, that person/place/construct/object is forgotten, as if to never have existed. For our purposes here, the unvisible is the construct of the sundown town.

I first learned about sundown towns whenever I was a Freshman in high school. No teacher ever taught me about them (or any of my classmates for that matter). Instead, I learned it from a classmate, who one day in World History class, and asked me, “Hey, Matt, did you know that Granite City used to be a sundown town? My dad told me that a siren would go off around 6 o’clock, and if any black people didn’t leave, they would be beaten.” In retrospect, this conversation seems incredibly random, but its very likely that I would not have learned about the construct until 2015- mind you, that is 3 years after I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree and 7 years since I graduated high school, when my girlfriend was telling me about a conversation she had with a professor at SIUE, Dr. Anushiya Ramaswamy. Considering both Granite City, where I grew up, and Glen Carbon, a close neighbor to SIUE, both were sundown towns, perhaps this should not be surprising. Personally testimony, of course, can count as weak evidence, but in the act of speaking about this apparent unvisible nature of sundown towns, perhaps I can generate a larger collective of voices to assert my claim.

Sundown towns, according to James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and the research head for an online database I used for my map, can be understood as any place that kept Blacks, Mexicans, Asian Americans, or Jews out from their city through means of “restrictive covenants throughout the town, violence or threats of same, bad behavior by white individuals, an ordinance, realtor steering, bank redlining, or other formal or informal policies.” When constructing my map, I focused upon the larger picture sundown towns occupy within the geography/demonic grounds of Illinois and did not focus on the individual groups who were discriminated against. That is a project for someone else to take up, or for me to undertake another day.

Map: drive.google.com/open?id=1v0YUKXBzWhQF8SLmJYKnXQUeI0k&usp=sharing

Some basic statistics: using information from the Illinois 2007 census, there are 1,299 municipal governments (cities, villages, and towns) and 102 county governments within the state. Using information Loewen collected and filtered through my map, there are 121 confirmed sundown towns and an additional 198 unconfirmed sundown towns, as well as 1 confirmed sundown county and 6 unconfirmed sundown counties. (Note:  what I label as “confirmed” is what Loewen labels as “surely” and what I refer to as “unconfirmed” consists of what Loewen refers to as “possible” and “probable.”) From this information we can conclude the following:

Of the 1,299 municipal governments that existed at the time of the 2007 census, appromixately 9.3% of the entire state consists of confirmed sundown towns, approximately 15.4% makes up the number of unconfirmed sundown towns, and if we are to add both numbers together to garner a possible maximum percentage of historically sundown towns within Illinois, that percentage is approximately 25%. (I used 2007 data only because I had trouble locating what I was wanting in the more recent data- if someone could point me to more updated versions of the statistics I need, that’d be grand.) While individually these percentages make a case as to why the concept of sundown towns is not necessarily within Illinoisan’s vocabulary, the possibility that there could be 1/4 of Illinois’s total cities that have a history of being sundown towns is a startling realization. Furthermore, the data set Loewen has is incomplete, so there is a possibility that these percentages could be even larger.

Some other observations from the map: in regards to confirmed sundown towns, they appear to be spread largely around the southern borders with Missouri, Kentucky, and Indiana. From a zoomed out position, they appear to dominate these portions of the map, though of course, there are plenty of towns within these regions that are not recorded as being sundown towns at all. The unconfirmed sundown towns overlap with some of these regions, but it largely spreads upward towards the Northeast, around the Chicago area. This leaves the Northwestern portion of Illinois relatively untouched. This could simply be because missing data or it is possible that the minority groups these sundown towns discriminated against never migrated that far North.

One more observation:  many of the places listed as sundown towns, confirmed and unconfirmed, also include some of the largest cities from Illinois, including 2 confirmed cities that are Chicago suburbs. There are also enough unconfirmed city-suburbs that counting them all is a chore in itself- a task for another day perhaps? For Madison County, the county SIUE is located within, East Alton, Granite City, and Glen Carbon are all confirmed sundown towns. Worden, Wood River, Madison, Maryville, Roxana,  St. Jacob, and Highland all are unconfirmed sundown towns. Excluding incorporated territories, this means that at the perceived most, 10/26 municipal governments (using data from the county’s website) or 38.6%, of the municipal governments within Madison have a history of being sundown towns. Within this ratio, 4/9ths, or approximately 44.4%,  are classified as cities within the county (meaning they have at least 2,500 people living within them [United States Census Bureau]) and 6/17, or approximately 35.3%, of the villages within this county may have this history.

Some questions worth pondering: how does the ratio of confirmed/unconfirmed number of sundown towns within Illinois compare to other states? How many of the towns which Loewen does not have data for also are historical sundown towns, if any? How does the history of these sundown towns reflect within the regional politics? Is there a political reason as to why certain unconfirmed cities are not confirmed as sundown towns?  Is there any correlation between municipal governments that are confirmed historical sundown towns/suspected historical sundown towns and educational programs that include content regarding sundown towns within their curriculum? How does population size affect these ratios further?

Works Cited (Unnecessary for an Unconference, I suppose, but still useful):

Loewen, James W. “How to Confirm Sundown Towns.” Sundown Towns:  A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. 2015. Web. 11 June 2016.

—. “Possible Sundown Towns in Illinois.” Sundown Towns:  A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. 2015. Web. 11 June 2016.

McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.     Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Print.

United States Census Bureau. “Illinois County Governments.” Census.Gov. 2007. Web. 11 June 2016.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Grounds’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman.’” 1990. The Black Feminist Reader. Eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 109-127. Print.

Work Consulted:

Madison County Assessment Office. Illinois Madison County.Gov. 2015. Web. 11 June 2016.

Digital East St. Louis Project

-Dr. Jess DeSpain

East St. Louis

-Population decreased 82,3666 in 1950 to 27,066 in 2010.

-Source of Project Funding: National Science Foundation ITEST

Purpose of Digital East St. Louis Project is to attract East St. Louis natives, who largely constitute under-represented groups, into STEM

Project Overview:

-Develop + test an urban place-based learning model

-Cohort of grade 6-9 participants progress through 4-week summer camps and Saturday sessions during the school year over a three-year period

-5-6 Instructors help develop + deliver content in the hopes they will take what they learn into their classrooms

Urban Place-based Education

Participants ask questions, solve real-world problems, and use field work to gather information in a local urban setting

Impacting Local Communities

1. Pairing “IRL” experiences with digital methods
2. Begin projects with a goal of listening + learning from participant experiences
3. Gauging participant technology use + needs
4. Forms of reciprocity when facing a lack of basic human needs

Middle School: age where STEM based interests often fade away, also age where web-building commonly involves playing around with text in ways that might hurt the eyes of an adult, but for the student, it is the coolest thing ever. They play with WordPress sites before working on main project.

If could start it over, prefer to work with smaller cohorts (15 at a time beginning in the summer)

Project should last 4 Years- ideally each student will be transferred into upward bound (upward bound=college readiness program for high schoolers), 3^rd year = more options, e.g. graphic novels/game design, Intrinsic based: extrinsic learning does not equal long term learning.

Biggest tension: how much control over website is given to students vs. providing a usable database

Best way to encourage extrinsic motivation: choice + presence of friends

Problems with Project: because basic human needs are not always met in East St. Louis, it has been hard to get people involved

Better luck getting people to show up by texting students instead of parents

Omeka

-Dr. Jessica DeSpain [note:  the more ridiculous parts of this post are of my own invention to help others, as well as myself, relate some of the more tech-heavy parts of Omeka into an easy to understand context]

“Omeka” (pronounced oh-MEH-ka): Swahili word meaning to “display or lay out wares”

-Created at George Mason University

Is Omeka the right choice?

-Have set of things to display on wed

-Best when you have complete info about each object

-Not great for a simple website (consider WordPress instead)

-Not great is want control over how things look

-Not great is you want sophisticated dynamic queries of database

-Not great if you want to create complex paths through collection (Consider Scalar instead)

Which version?

yoursite.omeka.net

-free on Omeka.net servers

-fewer functionalities than full installaion/Omeka.net susbscription

-Example of Omeka hosted page: eaststlouisculture.org/omeka/

This page costs $20 a month for Omeka to host.

Omeka Vocab:

Item:   things added to site (like images, scanned pages)

Item Type: type of thing added to site (videos, photo, etc.)

Collection: grouping of items on site (e.g. digital book)

Exhibit: items displayed together on site

Metadata: specific groupings amongst items on the site (think Subject)

e.g. Wide, Wide World, Geography, or History of Tacos

Tags: generic pieces of information (more general searchable terms)

e.g. cats, tears, or Chuck Norris

Theme: look of site

Plugin: programs that can be added to a site

Simple Pages: type of plug-in to easily create web pages, basic, not detailed

Geoserver: server for multiple layers of maps, needed to run Neatline (Neatline not necessarily recommended for mapping, but no other option for Omeka without embedding new code into Omeka)

Building Omeka Pages

• Create a Plan: Organizing content- determine how site will be structured, requires you know beforehand what sections + subpages of exhibit will be. E.g. a flowchart can help you understand hierarchy of items, collections, +exhibit pages in Omeka Tricky Aspect of Item Description- are you describing item or photo?
• Prepare Items for the Web: important concepts for optimizing image for web use- file size, image size, + image resolution always do a “save as” when working with images + keep a folder for originals and one for edits
• Add Core Fields: Dublin Core + Controlled Vocab, subject=topic of resource, description= account of resource, relation=establishes one item’s relation to another item, format= file format/physical medium/dimensions of resource, language= language of resource
• Build an Exhibit: install exhibit builder plug-in, enter exhibit metadata: title, slug, description, credits, + themes.

            Ex: widewideworlddigitaledition.siue.edu

Warning: adding items monotonous business, important to keep intellectual goals in mind.

Importance of Controlled Vocab: to help unify searches and keep relationships amongst items easy to locate, agree ahead to use specific terms so that items that should be related to one another pop up within same search. Ex: if one image shows George Washington on a unicorn and another image shows George Washington punching a T-Rex on a nose, but the unicorn picture is tagged only as General Washington and the T-Rex picture is tagged only as President Washington, the two will not appear within the same search.

Possible use for Omeka: Student run blog/magazine?

Places to host: Bluehost (good IT) + Amazon Web Services (free terabyte of storage)