Week 5

This week’s readings on historical geographic information systems (HGIS) helped us think about the ways in which HGIS could be useful as a tool for historical analysis as well as a way to open access to layers of historical and geographic data to a broader network of historians for their analysis and interpretation. HGIS can help us make connections that we would not have noticed had they not been in a visual format, as they did for Susan Grunewald when she mapped the presence of German prisoners of war in forced-labor camps across the Soviet Union, finding that camps were not primarily used for punishment but for rebuilding the Soviet economy.¹ HGIS is also a tool for public history, allowing layers of geographic and historical data to be used by historians as well as individuals and communities. Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, for example, took federal redlining maps of major American cities in the 1930s and layered them onto a map of the United States, then added color-coded and searchable data on each area within a city based on federal “area descriptions.” Another similar project in Minnesota, Mapping Prejudice, goes a step further to engage community members directly as volunteers, organizing them through mapping workshops and connecting them to free legal and title services to remove discriminatory language from their property titles. What impressed me about this particular HGIS project is how extensively it is embedded in its locality, partnering across schools, community organizations, legal firms, local government, and other institutions, which made all kinds of collaborations possible. I was also impressed by the care they took in engaging communities of color, designing a 90 minute workshop specifically for them to create space for dialogue, connection, and healing. These kinds of public HGIS projects require long-term institutional commitment. 

In our project team, we decide to move forward in collaboration with GMU’s Center for Mason Legacies, and will be expanding on the 100 Years of Black Falls Church project. The project collected a number of oral histories from the Tinner Hill area, which we will code for people, locations, social and cultural events and spaces, and then map, along with information on property ownership. We will be working within Omeka S, which is what the original site was built on. Our conversations with CML so far indicate that the project could help further two broader goals – to address a lacuna in HGIS projects about African American social and cultural life (there tend to be more around legal issues and property rights); and to bring attention to the need for rehabilitation of older digital history projects. We also learned about KnightLab, which creates digital storytelling tools for reporters that also make sense for the purposes of public history. Two digital tools we could experiment with are Juxtapose, which allows you to layer old and new maps for frame comparisons, and Soundcite, which lets you embed audio into written narratives. This might be a good way to bring the oral histories to life in a way that doesn’t require folks to listen to hours of tape.

1. Susan Grunewald, “Beyond the Archive: What GIS Mapping Reveals about German POWs in Soviet Russia,” Perspectives on History, February 26, 2019, https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/beyond-the-archive-what-gis-mapping-reveals-about-german-pows-in-soviet-russia-february-2019/  ↩︎