Tag Archives: mapping

Praxis 2: Mapping The Object Library in Time + Space

For Praxis 2, I mapped The Object Library in Time + Space.

I created a site on the commons for this assignment called LOCUS which features a world map of locations related to select objects collected during the Bring-A-Thing-A-Thon, and a timeline of the dates assigned to the objects by the curator/Director of the Center for the Humanities, CUNY.

My process notes are posted there and also here (see below).

To view my project, please visit: LOCUS

[PLEASE NOTE: you must be logged in to the Commons to access the LOCUS site.]

PROCESS NOTES:

I was very inspired by assisting the Center for the Humanities with The Object Library and still mulling the Oct. 9 Ramsay reading’s Search/Browse observations. With these in mind, and with myself still in a browse-rather-than-search mode, I applied the content of TOL to Praxis 2: Mapping.

Also in mind, was a “proof of concept” toward a mapping element for my Humanities References digital tool that I’m building toward the ITP Certificate.

Last semester I took a Data Vis workshop with Micki Kaufman and she introduced us to Gephi, which is a truly interesting platform. I was fascinated by it during the workshop and subsequently really intrigued by it. I even found an error in the code in the first few minutes of the workshop never having seen or worked with Gephi prior to the workshop.

So, if/when I master Gephi, which I hope to throughout the MA in DH, my goal for my Humanities References project would be to map the locations/origins associated with the references/entries in combination with showing them in the the context of time i.e., history, via the JS3 Timeline they reside on located at PointsOfReference / PREFERENCE [n.b. you must be logged on to the Commons to view this site.]

Therefore, I created both of these elements for the mapping assignment using zeemaps.com and Timeline JS3 toward select objects for Mapping The Object Library in Time + Space.

Thanks to a spontaneous and very helpful hallway conversation with Augustin as I “shopped” mapping platforms and expressed my concern about using arcGIS to him because 1) I wasn’t sure if we were required to use it and 2) I’d already invested much time in building a timeline, I chose an “over-the-counter” type mapping tool with a low learning curve. What I discovered is even the “simplest” mapping tools, such as those used by real estate agents, are quite tricky.

This project really gave me a sense of how revolutionary geo-spatial applications toward the humanities can be, as the readings for this week’s class, Oct. 16, claimed and conveyed.

I also became versed in object-based ontology in assisting The Object Library, and this project simultaneously and synergistically enhanced this new knowledge.

Make Women’s Health Accessible Again (Mapping “Red” State Abortion Services)

It was difficult to decide on a topic to map for this assignment. With an assignment like this being very broad, it becomes hard to choose what to look at.  Indecision is my worst enemy. I wanted to map content that I was passionate about so eventually I turned to women’s health care access in the United States. Recently, many right-wing politicians have been more aggressively fighting Planned Parenthood and specifically women’s access to abortion services. Inspired by the Safe Place project, I wanted to do an updated mapping of abortion centers in the United States. I was curious to see how many abortion centers were still available to women across the country, specifically one’s sponsored by Planned Parenthood.

I began to collect my data by using the Planned Parenthood Health Center finder feature (by state). Quickly, I realized that the amount of data clean up I would need to do for this project would require me to work beyond the assignment. I decided to narrow my scope a bit. This led me to wonder how many abortion centers were left in states that voted red during the Trump/Clinton election. These “red” states typically tend to advocate against women’s access to abortion resources, so it would be interesting to map these out to get a visual of the distance between centers.

For the sake of the assignment, I was only interested in mapping centers that actually had abortion services within their facilities. Abortion services range from providing the abortion pill to in-clinic abortions, to pre and post-abortion care. There were many centers that offered only abortion referrals, however, were not able to perform abortion procedures within their facility. It’s hard to tell by the website exactly how easy it is to obtain an abortion near you from a local doctor using an abortion referral. The user of the website is prompted to call in for more information from each center.  Thus, I wanted to see the amount of specifically abortion service centers in “red” states.

First, I found all the red states from the 2016 election and combed through all of the Planned Parenthood-sponsored centers to determine the addresses to map. This was the most time-consuming part. One of my big takeaways from this project was the amount of time it took to organize and clean data. I had hoped that there was already an easily accessible list created all in one place, however, this was not the case. I needed to go through each state and then each center in each state individually to determine which centers specifically provided abortion services.

Next, I utilized ArcGIS Mapping software to plot the points across the United States. Here were my results:

Zoomed out map of the USA

There were several “red” states that had no abortion centers included sponsored via Planned Parenthood (some had abortion referrals but I chose to exclude them from the data). They were as follows:

  • West Virginia
  • North Dakota
  • Kentucky
  • Louisiana
  • Mississippi
  • Wyoming

I was not particularly shocked by the results, though it was quite discouraging to see how limited the options were for many of the “red” states. Most of the centers were only available in larger cities posing barriers of accessibility for those in rural America. One specific example of this is in Ohio, a state with a general population of almost 11.7 million. Within the state of Ohio, there were only three centers with Planned Parenthood-sponsored abortion services housed in the cities of Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus.  Many women have to travel several miles to get to one of these centers, especially those who reside in states with no Planned Parenthood abortion services (both Kentucky and West Virginia share borders with Ohio, however, both states have no Planned Parenthood abortion services). While Planned Parenthood isn’t the only resource for abortions in the United States, it’s arguably the most accessible and known resource. Centers that are not Planned Parenthood are a bit harder to find. I did my own Google searches for some of the states that did not have any options for obtaining abortions but struggled to find easily accessible options.

Since I’m originally from the small town of State College, Pennsylvania I wanted to see how accurate this provided data was by trying to schedule an online appointment for a nearby abortion. While there were a few options provided by Planned Parenthood for abortion services within less than 100 miles of State College on my map, when I went to schedule an actual appointment (specifically for obtaining an abortion) the closest option was actually in Pittsburgh, approximately 2.5 hours or 140 miles away. Thus, I worried that the data provided by Planned Parenthood was not always perfectly up-to-date or that all the centers were not actively or able to take a patient that needed an abortion immediately.

Similar to Quinn’s mapping project, I thought about the “All Models Are Wrong” article we read by Richard Jean So and asked myself what is missing from this data. What can be changed with this model for understanding abortion access in the United States?

Ultimately, the map doesn’t reflect all the myriad barriers that people experience in trying to obtain an abortion. Like my quick search in State College, the map does not always accurately represent centers that are actively accepting patients at the time of the search or still open. Similarly, it does not account for other restrictions placed by states on those who are seeking abortions including forced waiting periods and counseling requirements, and/or take into account how systems of oppression like capitalism or racism add additional barriers to access. At the end of the day, it’s simply a map that contains well-meaning information on abortion centers that tries to make them easy to find and access. While it’s not perfect, it’s at least a start. It’s a model that can and must change. 

Besides adding in the “blue” state abortion services centers (which would be nice to see alongside the red states), it would be helpful to establish some programming that allows these locations to be automatically updated when a center is able to receive patients or goes out of service. Unfortunately, I do not have the necessary programming skills (or know if this is even possible), but this would be an interesting project to consider.

Overall, while there are some limitations with utilizing mapping software like ArcGIS it was still interesting and beneficial to use. I’ve just scratched the surface of its features, but hope to continue with this project to add in the blue states and other tools/programming in the future. 

Illustration Maps and Stories

Bartleby x Cost-Surface Analysis

I found the ‘GIS and Literary History’ reading by Patricia Murrieta-Flores et al very interesting. The concepts of Cost-Surface Analysis and friction maps were new to me. Below is a friction map illustration of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville. This depicts the period toward the end of the story where Bartleby ceases to move or comply with requests. The space Bartleby occupies is represented by his answer to all requests, “I would prefer not to.”

An animation over time might show the squares around Bartleby changing hue from a green that indicates positive inducement to movement, to red indicating high friction / low incentive to action. An alternate reading might be that the state of inaction changes from high friction to most desirable, which could be shown by the space Bartleby himself occupies changing from red to green*.

*There are certain deuteranopia- and protanopia-colorblind-friendly combinations of red and green hues, though a different divergent color scheme might be clearer. For black and white reproduction, this could be represented by a heat map showing changes in lightness and/or an increasingly dense pattern.

Image caption: Friction map showing Bartleby at desk
Photos from Unsplash: wood by rawpixel, brick by Joshua Hoehne

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Just for fun: The Stranger x Weather Mapping Symbols

I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this illustration of The Stranger by Albert Camus, but it entertains me. As a side note, weather mapping could certainly do with better ways to show uncertainty.

Also just for fun: The Yellow Wallpaper x Floor Plan

I didn’t have a chance to finish this illustration. I’d intended to set the below map showing the bedroom in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ into a house floor plan to accentuate the severe confinement the narrator of that story experienced. This illustration depicts the very end of the story, “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”

(Apologies for the repeat posting. I had trouble getting images to render correctly in the post and didn’t realize I wasn’t in draft mode.)

Not a Map, but toward a Map: A Deformance

I didn’t do a mapping project. I started out thinking I wouldn’t do a mapping project, and ended up not doing one, but in between those two states, I spent a lot of time thinking about a mapping project.  Thus, I don’t have a map, but I thought I’d share what I do have in case people are interested — please let me know if this is out of bounds.  (In case this is weird to Matt and Stephen: I’m definitely doing a network analysis later, so this doesn’t need to “count.”)

The assignment suggested a novel, and after thinking about it for a bit, the novel that came to mind was Octavia Butler’s time-travel novel Kindred. It was short enough that I thought I might be able to look through it again and find all the places, and the role of place is really important in the work.  For those who haven’t read it, Kindred is a time-travel novel about American history. In it, an African American woman named Dana is repeatedly drawn back through time to the assistance of her ancestor, Rufus, a white son of a slaveholder, and eventually a slaveholder himself. Because Dana is brought back through time against her will, not to her own benefit but for the sake of a white person, and with no way out except through near-death experiences, her journeys are a metaphorical mirror for slavery — but she is also very literally made a slave at these times.

As you may imagine, place and time are central in the novel, which relies heavily on the difference between “here” (Maryland in the ante bellum South) and “home” (Los Angeles, 1976) — a difference in both space and time.

I needed a way to keep track of all the places mentioned in the novel, so I found myself doing what I eventually recognized as a deformance! I read through the book and made a note of each time that a place was mentioned.

It turns out that this is not quite as easy as it sounds. Ramsay’s point about a computer being able to do a deformance more completely and consistently than a human is well-taken, even for a work of medium length (in this case, a 300-word novel).  I started out wanting to be quite literal about what did and didn’t qualify as a place — hoping to identify only places that could theoretically be identified on a sufficiently detailed map, at least with the aid of the context provided in the novel. This became difficult and ambiguous almost immediately, but I tried throughout to stick to a few rules:

  • I would count physical places, but not experiences or metaphors. I did include Hell and Heaven when they were treated as places
  • Places that are mentioned but not visited count
  • Where someone is in relation to an object (or at any rate a small object) is not a place
  • A person is not a place, even if they seem like one grammatically

As the novel went on, I found that I really needed to include the domestic spaces that make up so much of Dana’s experience, but I tried not to include where people were in relation to furniture. I made an exception for furniture large enough for a person to go into, like a bed or a bathtub. I’m not completely sure this makes sense when I’m excluding desks and fireplaces…

In any case, I thought I’d share one of the more interesting chapters. This is from section 6 of “The Fight.” In this section, Dana asks what happened to her husband Kevin, who she brought back with her to the past and accidentally left there. Additionally, Rufus finds a history book that Dana brought back with her from the future. Dana, after some reflection on the possible ramifications of his having it, takes it away and later burns it. This section includes more references to places outside Dana’s experience, though many of them are close to the plantation on which she finds herself. When the narrative mentions Talbot County, Dorchester County, and Southampton, Virginia, Dana is thinking of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Nat Turner.   So my deformance looked a little like this:

Baltimore
beside his bed
home
Pennsylvania
where Kevin was
that river
at that river
home
home
Philadelphia
At home
New York
Boston
Boston
Maine
north
West
Maine
Maine
the cookhouse
out here
out of the house
Baltimore
there
there
there
New Orleans
New Orleans
down there
Louisiana
in the cane fields
California
In town
Maryland
Louisiana
slave states
here
where he is
North
onto his bed
New York
South
Maryland
Talbot County
Dorchester County
Eastern Shore
Southampton, Virginia
Maryland
Virginia
to town
the plantation
on the place
Boston
home

You can see the rest of it online. (Apologies for the inconsistent capitalization — I worked on two different devices, one of which automatically capitalized the beginning of each cell, and I haven’t had the chance to clean it up.)

In any case, even though it didn’t  result in a map, this showed me a lot about the book.  I noticed the contrast between “here” and “home” and the often slightly euphemistic feeling of the word “here;” it refers to the plantation, the time period, the condition of slavery altogether. I also noticed how, in the plantation chapters, the focus on domestic spaces creates this sense of a closed world in which movement is limited and the same few places come up again and again.  “Town” (Easton, Maryland) seems no nearer than Boston — neither is really available as a travel destination.

Of course, if I were doing this for a more serious purpose, it would be necessary to go back over and look for things I’ve missed or wrongly included. Ultimately, I think this would be a great job for TEI, which does allow places to be encoded as such in metadata — but encoding an entire novel is far beyond my capabilities at this point.

In any case, I definitely chose too big a project for this assignment and didn’t have time to actually work with maps, but I still think this novel is a good one for mapping.  As I worked through the readings for this week, it provided a focal point from which I could think about the relationship between time and place that Presner describes, and the thick relationships between immediate, personal reality and the larger political and economic systems that Ayers insists on, and I’m still thinking about how those could be visually represented.  Layers for time periods? Maybe, but also maybe layers for the slavery laws at the different times that Dana visits, or a layer showing the sites of resistance with the rebellions and escape routes referenced in this chapter. Or maybe layers based on scale– the relationship between tiny domestic spaces and grander concepts of cities and states is really important in this novel, because Dana is aware of other places and often speaks or thinks about them, but cannot access them.  Instead, most of the actual action of the novel takes places on a much smaller scale (and to some extent I realize this is true in every novel, but it’s thematically important in this one). There’s a lot here, and I’m sorry I couldn’t have this map available for everyone because in my mind there’s a lot that could be done with it. (I really struggled with ArcGIS and played around with GoogleMaps some.)

Some Resources with Indigenous Maps

Today is Indigenous People’s Day, so I thought I’d look around for some indigenous mapping projects, which certainly count as DH. I found a couple resources that I wanted to share here.

Native Land seems to be a well-known resource. The first thing a user of the website sees is a disclaimer:

This map does not represent or intend to represent official or legal boundaries of any Indigenous nations. To learn about definitive boundaries, contact the nations in question.

Also, this map is not perfect — it is a work in progress with tons of contributions from the community. Please send us fixes if you find errors.

If you would like to read more about the ideas behind Native Land or where we are going, check out the blog. You can also see the roadmap.

…So this may not be an accurate source of information and it’s definitely a work in progress. According to its “About” page, the website is run by Victor G. Temprano, who is not himself Native. However, I do think that being upfront about the potential flaws in the map is a good move.  Additionally, the map links to a page about using its information critically. In particular, this page deals with some of the difficulties of using the colonial format of a map to illustrate the overlapping indigenous territories. Interestingly, this map also doesn’t address the issue of time, so we can’t see how territories may have changed over time.

All that said, I really like the immediacy of this map and the way it shows those overlaps.  According to the map, the Graduate Center is on Lenape land, and the Delaware and Montauk languages were spoken here. The map also includes links to information about these languages and the websites for the nations/tribes (both words seem to be used in the links?)

In any case, the other interesting resource I came across was this Indigenous Mapping Workshop, which provides ” geospatial training and capacity building to bring culturally relevant and appropriate earth observation technologies to support Indigenous mapping.” This workshop has been offered annually since 2014. I poked around the website but didn’t see links to any of the projects people have created in this workshop. However, it reminds me Miriam Posner’s piece, ” “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities.”  In that piece, she critiques the way that many DH projects have built on existing, colonialist infrastructure. I’m interested in how the work done in this workshop breaks free of that.

Data for Mapping workshop notes

This past Tuesday I attended a Digital Fellows workshop called Data for Mapping: Tips and Strategies. The workshop was presented by Digital Fellows Javier Otero Peña and Olivia Ildefonso. Highlights of this workshop were learning how to access US Census data and seeing a demo of mapping software called Carto.

Javier started the workshop encouraging us to interject with any questions we had at any time. The group maybe too enthusiastically took him up on this, and he had to walk it back in the interests of time after we spent 20+ minutes on a single slide. After that, the workshop moved along at a nice, steady clip.

There was a technical challenge, which I see as an unexpected boon. Carto changed their access permissions within the few days before the workshop, and nobody except the Digital Fellows could access it. The Digital Fellows had an existing account, so they were still able to demo for us how to use Carto. 

I think it’s for the best that we weren’t able to access Carto and set up accounts. Many workshops, including a Zotero one I went to a couple of weeks ago, bleed pretty much all their allotted time on getting software set up on each of the 10-20 attendees’ varied personal laptops. I find this incredibly painful to sit through. But in this workshop we established early on that we wouldn’t be able to individually install Carto, and so we were able to cover many more specifics on how to actually use Carto. Users who need installation help can always go to Digital Fellows office hours on their own.

Javier and Olivia shared their presentation deck with us. It is a thorough walkthrough of the steps needed to get Census data on the median age by state, and map that data in Carto. One note: in the upfront where it says the contents are for QGIS, replace that in your head with Carto. It is all about Carto. The QGIS references are accidentally in there from an older version.

I did some digging after the workshop on how to register to use Carto. Student access for Carto now requires a student developer GitHub account (which also includes free versions of other fun looking tools). GitHub says it can take from 1 hour – 5 days after applying on their site for your student developer account to be approved. I applied to have my regular GitHub account classified as a student developer account 5 hours ago using a photo of my GC ID card and haven’t heard anything yet, so I guess this really is going through some sort of vetting process. Maybe using a GC email address for verification would be faster.

This workshop was a good time, not least because Javier was extremely funny and Olivia was super helpful coming around to us to address individual questions. Five out of five stars. Would workshop again.