Author: Ella Callon

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Week 7 – Redlining and Interpolation

  1. What patterns do you see between mortgage companies and locations that supplied lendeesin Philadelphia?

Here, the total number of mortgages are shown shaded in black. More darkly shaded areas are the ones in which the most mortgages were offered. Berean Savings and Loan Association, a black-owned company, is shown in green. This company’s mortgages were concentrated in areas marked to be high-risk. Metropolitan Life, shown in red, was not a black-owned company. It also sold most of its mortgages in high-risk areas, but the correlation is not quite as dramatic.

    2. Which regions had the highest interest rates?

    In this map, high interest rates are shown in dark orange. They line up almost exactly with the areas marked as the most high-risk for lenders.

    3. What indication do you see (if any) that HOLC maps caused redlining (as opposed to
    mapping preexisting discrimination)?

    Here, the percentage of black people living in each neighborhood is represented as a cloropleth map underneath the interest rate layer, with the highest percentages of black residents in purple. Some of the districts the HOLC marked as high risk were in places with few black residents, but the HOCL marked all places with a high percentage of black residents as high-risk. This suggests that while race wasn’t the only factor that caused districts to be marked high-risk, it definitely was a factor.

    4. What additional data layers do you think might supply evidence of discriminatory housing policy/segregated urban development that you don’t have access to in this exercise?

    I’m not very familiar with the intricacies of redlining and honestly, I barely know what a mortgage is, so I don’t think I’m very equipped to identify what data I might be missing. That being said, I think it’d be interesting to be able to see how much money these companies made from collecting interest in different areas. That would help to determine the motivation for their lending patterns and show how much high interest rates affected the likelihood of people taking out loans.

    5. Create one clear, legible map that you think best demonstrates the most compelling
    visualization of redlining in Philadelphia.

    I think that the layer showing interest rates is a very important piece of evidence, but after trying a few different things, I wasn’t able to make it look comprehensible. It looks fine on its own, but when you add any other layer to the same map, it becomes very hard to tell what’s going on.

    My second idea was to show the percentage of black residents in each neighborhood over the HOLC map, but QGIS wasn’t letting me change the opacity of the polygon layers for some reason, so I’ve settled for making the georeferenced HOLC map transparent. It doesn’t look very good, but it does display the same information: neighborhood with a high percentage of black people were always marked as high-risk. The best I could do for readability was get rid of the basemap.

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    Week 9 – Intro to ArcGIS Online

    Here are my maps. The higher the percentage of land cultivated, the darker yellow the counties appear.

    1880
    1900
    1940

    The increasing amount of land developed into farmland is definitely visually apparent. Generally, farmland spread to the west, but the areas with the very highest proportion of developed land stay more or less the same. Dark yellow is mostly concentrated in eastern Kansas in all three maps. Although westward expansion and the construction of irrigation infrastructure allowed crops to be grown farther west, the best farmland remained in the northeast.

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    Stage 6 – Peer Review for Marie Amelse

    I really liked your project. The lenses of civic virtue and labor were interesting and fitting ways to examine the construction of the capital building. I think you did a great job of integrating those themes throughout the project, but I think it would have been even more effective if you included more analysis of the labor, materials, and ideologies involved in the building’s construction. I don’t have any criticisms of the map, itself; it was great! Your symbology choices were good. The light gray background made sure that the blue markers for the points of interest were eye-catching, and the spatial relationship between the quarries and the building was evident even at a quick glance. There wasn’t any extra information to clutter the map and make it harder to tell what it was arguing.

    You make a lot of mentions of the budget throughout the project. The numbers do a fine job of communicating how many resources were allocated to construction, but I think it would be cool if you had some sort of graph that showed how much money went to each thing. That would make it easy to compare and contrast the budget for the statues, the materials, and the construction.

    Another thing I liked was the layout of the page. Having the first few paragraphs be linear and the rest of the text scroll on the side made your project visually interesting. I didn’t know you could combine structures like that. Lastly, I loved that you used an image for the cornerstone ceremony. I would have assumed it wasn’t that big a deal if not for the picture of the crowds. Showing how many people attended really drove home the magnitude of the event.

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    Week 6 – Census Data and Cloropleths

    Cotton
    Corn
    Wheat
    Tobacco
    Sugar

    Just glancing at the maps, it’s easy to see that slave labor correlated strongly with the overall amount of crops harvested in each county. This correlation seems to be the strongest when it comes to cotton. The darkest areas on the cloropleth map line up almost perfectly with the cotton output. But while cotton was the biggest contributor, it’s also evident that the other crops were harvested using slave labor; every county with a high slave population outside of the cotton-growing areas correlates with another crop. For example, tobacco affected populations of enslaved people heavily in the northeast and in central Missouri. Sugar farming accounted for high numbers in southern Louisiana.

    If any of these crops weren’t harvested via slavery, it was wheat. Corn, while certainly not correlated as strongly with populations of enslaved people, does seem to have motivated slavery in northern Kentucky. Wheat doesn’t show a clear pattern, but because the patterns for other crops are so strong, I find it hard to believe that wheat just wasn’t harvested with slave labor. Wheat was mostly harvested further north and west, if I remember correctly. It’s likely that the amount of wheat being grown was just so low that it didn’t contribute significantly to the population of enslaved people.

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    Week 11 – Mapping Ethics

    Even before reading the ethics and analysis article, I agreed that the White Supremacy Mob Violence map was a better visual representation of the dynamics at play, although there were a lot of reasons for that that didn’t occur to me. When I looked it over, one of the main things I noticed was the level of detail. The White Supremacy Mob Violence map begins with an introduction to the concept of lynchings, the structures that motivated racial violence, and the varying methods that have been used to collect and map data about it. It also invites the reader to think critically about the map and ask questions about the data. Once you’re looking at the map itself, you can change the visualization to focus on different time periods and places, as well as click on individual points to read more about them. This provides a level of detail that doesn’t sacrifice the map’s impact on a wider scale; even when you are all the way zoomed out and haven’t selected a specific time period, you can make out the general patterns of where and to whom racial violence occurred. The concentration of black victims in the south and latinx victims in the southwest, for example, is obvious without seeming universal.

    While I agree with the article’s analysis that the color choices in the Racial Terror Lynching map make it seem like lynching was almost exclusive to the South, I do think they’re effective in other ways. The red stands out very well against the dark background and suggests the right tone of alarm or violence for the subject matter. This map is also not completely without detailed accounts. It utilizes short, engaging multimedia presentations to provide detail on a few representative cases. I think that method does the job alright, even if it’s not as good as the level of detail on the other map. The main problems with this one were those discussed in the article: it focuses too much on the South, isn’t very up-front with its methods or scope, and doesn’t use normalized data.

    I like the method outlined in the article on visualization ethics. It makes sure ethics are considered at every step of the process and decreases the likelihood of the end product being misleading. I also agree that interdisciplinarity is a valuable way to make sure that a project is both ethical and effective. The one thing I wasn’t a fan of was the idea that the humanities need their own, new visualization methods because the existing ones are tied to colonial contexts. Yes, the article acknowledges that it’s often better to use data visualization methods people are familiar with, and yes, most of them were developed in a western colonial environment, but I don’t think charts and graphs themselves are a problem; they only become a problem when you choose the wrong type of chart for a specific topic or dataset, thus skewing the reader’s perception of what you’re trying to visualize. Traditional graphs work just fine for the humanities. Any gaps can be filled in by good captions or other accompanying text. The major strength of digital visualizations over printed ones, in this case, is the ability to incorporate those more detailed explanations into the map itself using pop-ups or links rather than having to put them on a separate page. they can live in the map, grounding them more strongly in physical space, and then dispensary when you go back to a larger scale.

    In my final project, I don’t think I’ll have to consider the ethical concerns outlined in the article as much as I might if I were covering a different subject or using a different focus. The area I’m mapping is a single city park, albeit a big one, and I’m focusing on buildings and development rather than specific people or events. I’m not actually working with any datasets. I like the idea of including specific, personal stories in my map, much like in the White Supremacy Mob Violence project, but I’m not sure how feasible that is for a project of this scale. I’m not sure if I necessarily need to, with my focus being on the broader space and the ideology behind it. I think it’d probably be a good idea to include at least one personal account of one of the native people who was being exhibited at the fair in order to add in a sense of agency and make the story more impactful, but I’m not yet sure how to incorporate that.

    I will need to pay careful attention to transparency in my methods, though. The historical maps I’m working from are sometimes incomplete, illegible, or missing context, which makes it hard to know for sure how to categorize every building without doing a level of research that isn’t feasible for a project of this scale. My main ethical consideration will be noting when I’m making assumptions about the purpose of a building.

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    Project Proposal

    My plan is to look into Forest Park in Saint Louis, what the city’s intention for it is, and what it actually means to people during different points in time. Since it’s such a small area and I’m covering a range of different times and contexts, I think a series of detailed maps would be best. These would either be interactive maps or infographic maps, like the map of the United States by Bill Rankin that we looked at in week five. Instead of going into such deep detail with the map symbols, though, my text would be about historical context. I’d like to figure out how to put as much information on my topic into the maps, themselves, but I do think the accompanying writing will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

    In addition to historical context, I’d provide specific, real-world examples of ways that people have used the park. For recent history, I plan on interviewing people I know, but looking further back, I’ll need to get these stories from newspapers or personal journals. This will be easy when it comes to the World’s Fair, but trickier for the time in between then and the present. Historical maps and pictures will also be very useful.

    This project will illuminate the effects of spacial design and city spending, how much they correlate with the actual use of the space, and the ideologies that have driven the development of the park. What, and who, is it supposed to be for? Is the intention consistent with reality? I think I’ll come up with more ways the project has scholarly value as I do research, but at this point, I think I’ll find racial inequality and the idea of hostile vs. welcoming spaces emerging as a strong theme.

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    Final Project Stage 1

    Over time, what roles and forms has Forest Park in St. Louis, which was originally used for the 1904 World’s Fair, taken? How has the city invested in it, and how have people used it? What factors influenced those things?

    I’d like to research Forest Park from when it was first built up until today, tracking the evolution of both the park itself and the surrounding areas. I’m interested mainly in how the park has been used, perceived, and curated, but am also open to considering how the park exists in the memory of those who live in the city. I grew up in St. Louis and heard a lot about the legacy of the World’s Fair, but not much about the park in between 1904 and today. Few of the original buildings are still there, but the park still functions as a sort of center for arts and culture, housing the art museum, history museum, the zoo, and the Muny, a large outdoor theater. At the same time, it’s a large nature space in the middle of the city, with water features and even hiking trails through more loosely maintained natural areas. I haven’t narrowed down what dynamics I’d like to focus on, specifically, but I think these questions will be a good starting point for my research.

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