I used information from several sessions to create a blog and a first blog post. I hope to keep this blog going so I can continue to learn about the digital world.

jessicaadventuresblog.wordpress.com/

I am still playing with some themes and ways to use WordPress so this is a very early version of what I hope the blog becomes!

Jessica Mills

In 2014, I wrote an article for the SIUE student newspaper, the Alestle, which discussed the name origins of buildings on the SIUE campus. Unfortunately, that article never had a good way to visualize the way I wrote it. It turned into lengthy paragraphs that I was never happy with.

Having seen Dr. Hildebrandt’s presentation on mapping, I created a custom Google Map of all the major buildings on campus, with years for when they were built and a short biography for each building’s namesake.

Having created it in a day with writing two years old, I am happy with the result, though there are limitations to this product. It borders on historical antiquarianism with no explicit argument. Only people familiar with SIUE will likely care. Still, it could be used to form a larger narrative on the design of college campuses, as well as examining who buildings are named after. For example, more recently SIUE buildings are more likely to either have no “person” name or to be named after a alumni donor. There were also a number of building and location renamings in the 1990s, which is worth further examination.

Since this afternoon, I have been considering possible uses for interactive text games in the digital humanities.  Since they usually involve exploration, I thought that it might be a good way to make a historical tour guide.  I created a very simple guide to an imaginary town as a test of this concept.  My proof-of-concept model uses only three rooms and one object, but any number of locations could be added and described using images, videos, and text could be added to describe places along the tour. Individual parts of each location could be described in equally great detail by making them into objects within the rooms.

The Medieval Churches of Norwich project was an inspiration for this idea: https://norwichmedievalchurches.org/

The test model is here:

textadventures.co.uk/games/view/nde8pyj4g06pe1wy5oczxw/tour-of-an-imaginary-town

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.

Facilitator: Kristine Hildebrandt

We looked at some example maps in addition to the ones I included in the session proposal:

medievaldigital.ace.fordham.edu/exhibits/show/oxford-outremer-map/interactive-map

neatline.dclure.org/neatline/show/declaration-of-independence#records/1329

datadrivenjournalism.net/featured_projects/uk_tech_landscape_where_do_they_meetup

We made a map on Google Maps: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qlVBH_C3O7Q032EvBdoOHMuZ20o&usp=sharing

And here are the basic instructions for creating maps in Google Maps and in R (we didn’t have time to cover R)

I. Getting Started with “My Maps” in Google:

1. You need to have a google/gmail account

2. You can manually type ‘my maps’ into Safari, Chrome or any other web browser, or use this URL, which will prompt you to log in: www.google.com/maps/d/

3. “Create New Map”

4. Name your map, and then begin by manually entering spatial data (latitude/longitude, a post code, a place name), you can draw (add a point) on the map and then name that, or else you can import data from an excel, csv, or tab-delineated file

5. I recommend clicking on the “learn more” buttons anytime they are available

6. You can tailor your map points, you can tailor your map to different base types, and you can add polygons (boundary markers) to connect specific points to highlight spatial connections

7. You can save your map, you can make it public and share it with selected people or make it totally open, and you can create images of various types.

II. Getting Started with R:

R is a statistics package, but it has become more powerful than just that. It now has the ability to help you create customized maps of all types (along with countless other visualizations and images). I am just getting started with learning about R for mapping, but I can share what I do know.

1. First you need to download and install R (the latest version as of June 10 was version 3.3.0.

www.r-project.org/

You can download it from any one of the multiple “mirror sites” (a network of servers which host R). Choose the one closest to you. Follow the install prompts.

By the way: R Studio is also R, but it is sometimes a bit more user-friendly because it makes use of a more Windows/Office/OS-like user interface: www.rstudio.com/

2. Launch R or RStudio

3. You must install some “software” packages from the R package installer. These packages are little packets of data for mapping. You want to make sure that “maps” and “mapdata” are installed. You can then check for their presence in the R library:

library(maps)

library(mapdata)

4. This will produce a default map of the world

map()

You can add axes and scale:

map.axes()

map.scale()

5. In R, remember the X axis is longitude and the Y axis is latitude

6. Here are some coordinates. See what type of map you get. See if you understand what the numbers are telling you.

map(xlim=c(140, 160), ylim=c(-20,10))

map(xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35))

7. The map library has two types of maps: a default map “map” and a more high resolution map “worldHires”

You can compare: map(xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35))

with

map(“worldHires”, xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35))

Then, you can add your axes and scale again

8. You can import your own coordinates and place name labels, but you need to save the file as .txt or .csv tab or comma-delimited and quoted fields, and NOT as an excel file.

9. I have loaded this file: Languages_MapR.txt, which has the lat/long for 14 Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, Tibet, China and India

View(Languages_MapR)

This gives me a spread-sheet type layout. Now I want to plot these language names accurately on the map

Here are the languages and their coordinates plotted on a scatter plot of lat X long: plot(Languages_MapR$longitude, Languages_MapR$latitude)

Here is how the map looks:

map(xlim=c(80, 110), ylim=c(20,35)) #this lets you zoom in to the region

points(Languages_MapR$longitude, Languages_MapR$latitude) #here are the labels plotted

text(Languages_MapR$longitude, Languages_MapR$latitude, labels=Languages_MapR$name) #this lets me add language names as labels

There are some other tricks on the following web pages that allow for color and shading

Here are some tutorial sites that I’ve found useful. There are many others.

www.mpi.nl/departments/former-independent-research-groups/evolutionary-processes/tools/mapping-with-r

rpubs.com/nickbearman/r-google-map-making

You can use R and Google Maps together, too, but I am not as familiar with this:

www.bnosac.be/index.php/blog/41-visualisation-with-r-and-google-maps

I have some experience with making custom maps using Google Maps and also using some free software called (R), which was originally developed for doing statistics, but has become much more powerful and useful through time. I’m interested in leading a hands-on session to demonstrate some of the features of both tools, and to briefly mention some other shareware that is out there for mapping and geospatial visualization, that I am less familiar with (e.g., QGIS). I would also be happy to have any other members participate in this session if they know about additional programs.

Why is this an interesting topic? Maps are useful beyond much more than just making travel plans or identifying places and objects in space. They help us to understand relationships and make connections (both spatial and temporal). They let us “see” relationships. They offer a sophisticated way to analyze very different types of information or variables (e.g. space, history, and politics). Here are some examples of some projects that incorporate geovisualization in with topics and disciplines that are more familiar to my own education and professional experience:

Civil War Washington

The Manang Languages Project & Atlas

Dialect maps, like this one featured in the NY Times

The World Atlas of Language Structures

It would be useful if you have your own laptop (any OS will do) with internet access. I’ll demonstrate whatever I can, but you will be able to download and sample different tools alongside me and others if you have your own computer.

Session Organizers: Sudhamadhuri Arvapally, Jessica DeSpain, Matt Johnson, Sharon Locke, & Mallory Maves

This presentation will share work underway with Digital East St. Louis, a project funded by a National Science Foundation Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers grant. Housed at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the project is a collaboration between the Science Technology and Math Center, the Interdisciplinary Research and Scholarship Center (SIUE’s digital humanities Center), and the East St. Louis Community. In addition to sharing information about the project, we’ll also give session attendees the chance to interact with and comment upon student work.

Faculty in English and History who specialize in the digital humanities work alongside middle school teachers in the East St. Louis school district to develop a comprehensive three-year summer and after-school program for a group of middle school students. The research component of Digital East St. Louis is assessing how a digital humanities, place-based approach inspires student interest in the computer sciences. Over the three-year program, which launched in the summer of 2015, students will build a comprehensive database and a content-rich digital map showcasing their research into the history and culture of the city and its inhabitants.
One of the project’s primary goals is to encourage students to think across disciplines about ecology, geography, the lived environment, history, literature, and culture. Students will use skills central to information technology and information literacy to draw linkages between these topics, which will expand their critical thinking abilities and encourage them to see technology as a tool for exploring and visualizing broader questions. The project plans to train students in photography as they learn about East St. Louis architecture, learn about video production as they conduct oral history interviews with East St. Louis residents, and develop skills in research and metadata as they develop their own research interests for the project. This presentation will highlight the projects’ progress and discuss how to develop successful collaborations between the fields of STEM and the digital humanities in informal K-12 learning environments.