VLP

Above is just a brainstorming slide for our group--we have really just begin to research Mr. Smith's life. You can maximize the window above for review.

Clifford Wayne Smith died at 70 years-old on December 11 of this past year. His body is now at rest in the Georgia National Cemetery, because he served in the United States military for 22 months from 1969-1970.

I now feel the burden of honoring his whole life--not just the 22 months he spent preparing to go to Vietnam and then his heroic, medal-awarded service there--mainly because in 2014 he gave a 41-minute interview to a UCF student, one in which he candidly shared about his service and his difficulty transitioning back to civilian life. Honestly, I feel a bit daunted.

I am part of a team, and have much confidence in our competence as historians and our clarity of vision...but for some reason the fact that his loved ones lost him not even three months ago now intimidates me. That said, having lost my parents much earlier than I thought I would in 2017 and 2018, I know that there is a distinct possibility that the bereaved would find helping us to remember him therapeutic. So, I don't think wisdom dictates giving it time; the sequence humans follow in grieving seems remarkably diverse, and I know for sure I would have found consolation in knowing--even a matter of months after my loss--that a group of people were dedicated to preserving and broadcasting the value of who is gone.

We all, along with everyone we love, will one day be history, and I think the recency of Mr. Smith's death will make contextualizing his life and sharing it to others feel more like a solemn charge and privilege than a professional, scholarly enterprise--I might be daunted, but I'm looking forward to it.

VLP 1

One of my favorite mini-projects for Florida Virtual School was curating 2-3 oral history interviews with 36 Congressional Medal of Honor recipients. Soldiers represent the intensity of life and death—which we all face—at its highest concentration. They must face so much, so fast.

I read The Things They Carried and Tim O’Brien’s first book Going After Cacciato back in 2004. Strangely, though Carried is a much stronger work in terms of literary quality Cacciato has stuck with me more vividly. I’m enjoying re-reading Carried though.

I could not agree more passionately with the VLP’s mission of highlight the service of the whole lives of America’s veterans, not just time they spent in combat situations. I look forward to connecting an individual soldier’s life with the big picture of the Vietnam War and indeed of 20^th century (Cold War) world history.

1838 Map of Florida

This is the image I'm considering using to overlay my project.

Success!

I now have a list of more than 400,000 Orange County property parcels with building permit dates. Now I need to find an affordable way to geocode all those addresses! I'm currently looking at Texas A&M GeoServices--it appears as though they will allow me to do it in batches of 2500 for free if I credit them, which I most certainly will.

Make sure and go here if you want free geoservicing: http://geoservices.tamu.edu/

Digital Project Progress Report

1. Title: Orlando: from 85 people to 300,000
2. Abstract - There is a field (shown above) that shows the history of building permits on the property for a significant percentage of Orange County addresses--I have seen it go back as early as 1929, and have only found one that indicated no buildings were associated with the address. The employees at the Orange County Property Appraiser's Office are happy to share with me the data, charging only a nominal fee if it takes substantial clerical time to pull. Armed with a csv or .xlsx file with the addresses and dates, I can use www.gpsvisualizer.com to do a bulk address-to-coordinates conversion, and then transfer all of that processed data into visual eyes for a powerful illustration of the property development of Orlando over the past seventy to one hundred years. 
3. Principal Data Sources: Orange County Property Records
4. Visualization Platform: VisualEyes
5. Notes: I almost called this blog post "Getting Earlier than 1994." After an encouraging phone conversation, I sent the following email to an employee at Orange County Property Appraisers (OCPA):

The employee reassured me that I had come to the right place, and if I came by he/she would provide the data I need and I would not even need to pay the $50 special request fee. I was jubilant...and then more than a little bemused last week when I learned that what the employee had for me went back as far as 1994. After about 20 minutes there, I left with the reassurance that they will find where that building permit data is stored, because they could not find it within the data that they were about to give me. I have not heard back from them, and so tomorrow is probably the time when I will have to cut my losses and switch to a modest alternative digital project, their enthusiastic desire to help notwithstanding. 

Environmental Scan

In 1875, there were fewer than 100 people who called the new city of Orlando home. Fifty years later, the Old Cheney Highway still could not accommodate an automobile from one side of Orlando to the other. The first traffic light was not installed at the intersection of Colonial and Maguire Boulevard—less than 2 miles from Lake Eola in the heart of downtown—until 1963. What did the geographic transformation of Orlando look like?

I am interested in this question as a native Floridian who will never cease to marvel at the rapidity of urbanization since the second industrial revolution began to push agriculture to the margins with the speed of a hydraulic piston. In the not too-distant future, I hope to see what it looks like in the context of race. As Orlando has grown, its white citizens used legal and extralegal means of segregating the city racially. Since 1965, most of its citizens seem to this researcher to have made modest progress toward integration and racial harmonization, but varying degrees of fatigue, reaction, resentment, and even despair continue to belie the unity implied by the etymology of the word community.

With that background, I am grateful for three recent works of digital scholarship, the “Human Population Through Time” animation produced by the American Museum of Natural History in 2016, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America from 2013, and Renewing Inequality: Urban Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race 1955-1966 from 2018—the latter two works come from the exemplary Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.

Human Population Through Time

This presents the visualization that I am hoping to achieve, albeit at a vastly superior production quality than I will be able to reach. After something of a preamble 100,000 year prologue, it combines a line graph of the human population with a pixel-density map of the major urban areas from the beginning of the Common Era to present. The American Museum of Natural History’s production team were a bit curious in their selections of major civilizations to indicate with an icon superimposed over the map (why Roman and Han Empires, but not Gupta?), but it is not too distracting. The really impressive element is their sourcing. Anything at this scale is going to include a lot of speculation, but they do not trust in one scholar. This is part of the World Population History Project, and its sources and credits page is immense—more than 739 separate sources.

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

The New Deal’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation made incredible maps that color-coded America’s major urban areas in four grades: Best, Still Desirable, Definitely Declining, and Hazardous, color-coded (no pun intended) green, blue, yellow, and red, respectively (hence red-lining). The maps are becoming notorious, and it will be an indictment on Americans if the work of the people at the project do not make them more popularly-known and downright infamous. The following excerpt describing the now-extremely-rough area of Jacksonville I grew up in crystallizes the casual racism well:

The Panama Garden area and the southern portion of Northwest New Springfield are generally considered more desirable residential property than that in the remainder of this Section. The Section is occupied by 100% whites consisting principally of railroad men, City employees, clerical, and the lower-income salaried workers with annual incomes ranging from $1,000 to $2,500. Seventy percent of the occupants in this Section are home owners and there is no shifting of population [read: the whites are staying put and will not sell their homes to any more affluent blacks who might offer them a good price on their homes].”

Mapping Inequality is super strong in showing powerful interactivity and model georectification—it’s fantastic.

Renewing Inequality

I believe this will be the last major historical puzzle piece that can show me by analogy in Daytona Beach, Tampa, and Miami what almost certainly was done here in Orlando—the tragic preservation of inequality and segregation through urban renewal and urban housing developments. I must confess that its user interface is something of a cautionary tale to me of ambition; there is just so much data to sift through it is pretty daunting rather than enticing to this user, and I suspect I am a good bit more savvy than the median digital humanist. Still, all that information is an absolute Fort Knox of historical gold—it powerfully illustrates the scale and pervasiveness of the family displacements of all races in this period.

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/renewal/#view=0/0/1&viz=cartogram

And Now, I (AS)SERT...

My thesis research is focused on the peculiarity of the McCoy Air Base (now Orlando International Airport) when it was an island of racial integration within a sea of Jim Crow Orlando. The city’s de jure segregation did not end until the mid-1960s, but McCoy was integrated from its first reopening upon the start of the Korean War until it closed in 1975—some 15 years of a very traditional, conservative institution embodying a radically progressive social change.

The question my digital project hopes to answer is the background—how Orlando developed from 1875 to 1950. To be clear, my research question is far more broad, its chronological scope will extend into the 21^st century. My guiding notion is that context means a firm grasp on the before and after of the historical subject matter. I looked at the “Ask a question” and “Search for Answers” parts of Bill Ferster’s ASSERT model last week, and this week I finish his prescriptive acronym.

Structure

This is by far my biggest challenge in establishing my proof of concept on my timeline. There are several thousand individual parcels of land—far too many to scrape from the property records office, but I have been reassured that The extraordinary requests liaison for the Orange County Property Records Office is out of the office until next week, but once I meet with her I’m hoping I’ll be able to establish a systematic way to get a representative sample of land parcels and their registration with the city to trace through Orlando’s development as a city.

Ultimately, I hope to combine the parcel data with federal and state census data, particularly with reference to race. However, that will be outside the scope of the initial phase of the project. I will need to compile, or more hopefully/realistically find, a database of property records that include the date of a parcel’s earliest registration with the county.

The Holiday Inn on Alafaya and Colonial was constructed in 1989.

Surprisingly, one of the last businesses before Bithlo was built in 1968.

Envision the Answer

Ultimately, I see an animation that shows some 500-1500 land parcels (as many as I can with the time and resource constraints I'm working with) as they were developed over the past 120 years, from the turn of the 20^th century to the present. Once I have addresses and dates, it will just be a matter of curating the best map—probably a composite of geological land survey maps from the early-to-mid-twentieth century—and superimposing it over Google Earth, then using automation software to plot the points over a span of 240 seconds (4 minutes, derived from 2 seconds per year for 120 years). If the data for subdivisions and other neighborhoods is unmistakable enough, I might animate road construction as well, but time is unlikely to permit that, and it might yield a questionable return on investment—wherever land is being registered with the county, a road has likely been built to that parcel. The hope is that the animation will provide a compelling visual answer to the development question of Orlando, and that by going back and forth across the timeline patterns of settlement and development will be recognizable.

Represent the Visualization

Obviously, I will be working with a vector map. The aesthetic questions will be aural—what kind of sound would compliment the data being visualized?—and geometric—what kinds of polygons or dots will best illustrate urban development and expansion? I’m not too concerned about the congruence or apprehension principles, as my question is directly addressing time, and the animation will be playable at variable speed, a standard feature of VisualEyes and other similar software.

Tell a Story Using Data

What is exciting about this stage is that unlike Slave Voyages or many other famous geographic animations, I really am not sure what story will emerge. The basic fact—the steady growth over 145 years from a city of fewer than 100 people to nearly 300,000—lends itself to innumerable narratives and angles. I honestly don’t even know what geographic features may have drawn people in what directions; it will be super fascinating to see the convergence of communities around Winter Park, Lake Eola, and Pine Castle, and perhaps all around Orlando’s 31 lakes. Time, and of course the data, will tell!