Mark's Spatial History Baby Steps

 I suspect that our blog posts this week are going to be a bit less analytical than those in previous weeks, given that we were largely learning how to georeference historical maps and digitize features.  Click, click, click, click.  Below, please find a georeferenced map of my hometown, Summerville, SC, in June 1923, with a few blocks of buildings digitized. There were several steps in the process that did surprise me as I georeferenced and digitized features.  First, I was not totally surprised that the blocks in downtown in 1923 more or less matched the blocks today, given that I chose the downtown area to georeference.  (There was even a little bend in the road on the bottom right corner of the map that is still there.)  I was surprised, however, to learn that the railroad tracks were in exactly the same place since I know that there have been many changes to the rail lines themselves across the SC Lowcountry.  There were some fun buildings to find...

This process of trying to create maps has been a humbling one (in a good way), and as I spent this afternoon in our classroom trying to create a map that would shed light on a question I have had about the Lowcountry, I realized that my baby skills in ArcGIS Pro and even in navigating the NHGIS are still in their very infancy.  The question I had hoped to explore this week was the following: we know narratively that the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS  Supreme Court decision that led to the integration of public schools in America (and which actually originated in SC, not KS!) was not implemented until the 1960s in most of SC.   I was hoping that we could look at census data around school enrollment by race in 1950, 1960, and 1970 to see if the integration process had any relationship with school enrollment trends for children of diverse races and, if so, what these might look like on a map--perhaps looking at one or a few counties. My first stumbling ...

The series of maps I would like to create still lies well beyond my skillset (a reality that is likely to be true for some time), but it was fun to use the "time" function on ArcGIS Pro to get a sense of how railroads were expanding across the country in the mid-19th century.  Given that my mother's paternal side came to the US in the late 19th century from Sweden, I decided to look at the Swedish and Norwegian populations in the 1880 census data, and it was no great surprise to see that Minnesota and the Dakotas had relatively large concentrations of these populations at the time.  This map brings together the Swedish and Norwegian population as normalized across the total population, railroads in 1880, and major rivers. A couple of things stood out to me looking at this map: first, the Swedes and Norwegians in this northern Midwest area were, indeed, concentrated along both rail lines and rivers--notably the Red River that runs south from Winnipeg (and eventually create...

Ta-da!  My first map--or actually, my second as I accidentally clicked the back button on my web browser and lost the first one.  In this map, you'll see the Grade A - Grade D blocks that we all know a bit now in conversation with the 2010 census data about Black-headed households as a percentage of total population.  A magnum opus it is not. What questions could you investigate and/or answer with your GIS?  Seeing the Savannah River that runs through the town of Augusta, dividing Augusta, GA, from North Augusta, SC, one of my first questions was about potentially differential ways in which officials in the state of Georgia made use of the "potential" of redlining versus those in the state of South Carolina.  Were there private discussions held between officials of those states and federal surveyors?  Why didn't the town on the South Carolina side of the river get a single grade A block? What does your map do well and what are the limitations?  There ...

 Hi again, all. Mark Canavera, returning to South Carolina by way of: New York City (I lived in Harlem from 2011 until last week); Cotonou, Benin (2011); Niamey, Niger (2010); Abidjan and Man, Cote d'Ivoire (2007 - 2010); Kitgum, Uganda (2004-2005); and Ouagadougou and Piela, Burkina Faso (1999-2002). The temporal gaps in my list of places lived are when I completed earlier graduate studies: a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard, which was a wonderful learning experience despite my initial reservations about Ivy League snobbery, and an MA in Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, which ironically prepared me primarily to work in zones of active conflict. I am returning to graduate school now for what I hope will be a fairly consequential career pivot: I have always been passionate about civil rights and know that the United States, and especially white Americans, need to understand how racial oppression has been fundamental to our nation's founding and its evolu...