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!

ASSERT and Orlando

Orlando, Florida satellite image, and Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve satellite image, showing the same land areas. The images' centers are 40 miles from each other.

How did what we now call Orlando, Florida transform from former Seminole Indian territory with fewer than one hundred permanent settlements in 1885 to a city of more than 285,000 people in 2019? Of course, the simple answer is a combination of human migration and reproduction, but the more compelling answer is visual: less than five generations ago, Orlando's 114 square miles were all wetlands and some 31 lakes, and now they are a jungle of asphalt, concrete, human residences, businesses, and massive amusement parks. The images above illustrate the change starkly. Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve speckled with lakes is the Orlando of 135 years ago.

The question above is my application of Bill Ferster's Interactive Visualization: Insight Through Inquiry, specifically his ASSERT model:

Ask a question
Search for data
Structure the information
Envision ways to answer
Represent the data
Tell a meaningful story

Ferster's work is a powerful synthesis of more than 500 years of tradecraft in visualization, if one starts with Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man circa 1490. I must pay tribute to the design excellence of his introductory chapter: somewhere on page 37 my fascination with his historical survey of visualization theory and practice gave way to impatience--is he going to digest all that for his readers into a practical application? It was not even 200 more words of reading after thinking this before he introduced his ASSERT model, and my confidence in it is immeasurably greater having read his stimulating establishment of his bona fide expertise. Bluntly, I would not have the perseverance to read through (or even skim and distill) the score of theoretical works on data visualization that Ferster summarizes, but I am grateful that he did.

Asking my question is easy, but the search for data is where the challenge begins. Based on a initial foray into the historical maps at the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, I am fairly confident that I will be able to start with several dozen maps starting with mid-19th century military surveys and broadly trace out the city's development. Then come the devilish details: what level of detail do I want to shoot for? How comfortable am I with distortions for simplicity of visualization, e.g., animating road development at a constant rate when there were almost certainly delays of various kinds? In the next week or two, I hope to identify my primary sources and the ways I will structure them so as to make them manageable. I'm already envisioning ways I will represent the data, mainly through an animation that connects the historical maps to each other in a transparent way (making the potential distortions recognizable), and then perhaps too ambitiously I hope to provide a zoom feature and an easily adjusted timeline slider.

I've already learned something surprising that will make it into the story: Orlando's population growth is not nearly as much the story of NASA and the Walt Disney Corporation as one would think. Indeed, a line graph of the city's population over time shows no unmistakable spikes in the 1960s and 1970s--just a continuation of a more or less steady natural increase. Hopefully, through the construction of an interactive visualization of the city's growth and development, I will recognize more about the forces that have driven Orlando's birth and transformation geographically over the past 135 years.

Questions for Dr. Ferster:

1. What practical visualization software is the best 'gateway drug' for historians who are interested in but intimidated by interactive visualizations?
2. Even 19th century positivist historians wanted readers to interact with their texts in meaningful ways--how qualitatively different are modern historians' interactive visualizations from traditional prose-text scholarship?

Mapping Segregation in Washington D.C. Review

A typical deed restricted community's racist clause, legally invincible before 1948.

There is no historian of the modern American South more preeminent than C. Vann Woodward. He took the base metal boosterism of Atlanta journalist Henry Grady’s “New South” and transmuted it into the academic gold of “New South studies.” His Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 started many of the conversations that divide academics more than six decades after its publication, however it is the book that came from a series of 1954 lectures for which Woodward is most remembered. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, he argues--fairly implacably--that the very nature of the antebellum economy made segregation impossible, and so the militant de jure segregation of the South of his day was a relatively new phenomenon. The races had socially commingled before, and so there was reasonable hope that they could again--it was for this argument that Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Strange Career as “the historical bible of the civil rights movement”--that and the fact that Woodward was in Dr. King’s audience when he said it.

Whatever the “forgotten alternatives” were to segregation in the South, it was the reality of Woodward’s day...and now. Indeed, the hope that undergirded Strange Career was part of a movement that saw legally-supported and enforced segregation end and then a push to integrate that census data suggests was exhausted by the early 1980s. It would not be a gross oversimplification to say that the past 60 years has broadly traced an arc of racial progress: from a clash of racist conservatives (conservative strictly with reference to race relations, to be clear) and hopeful progressives, through an apex of idealism with the election of several black mayors in American cities, down to the current Big Sort that tragically makes de facto segregation appear not radically different.

It is in this context that the Mapping Segregation in Washington D.C. Project provides a powerful digital case study. It began in 2014, and has a well-focused frame:

For the past several years, Mapping Segregation in Washington DC has been documenting the historic role of real estate developers, citizens associations (white homeowner groups), and the courts in segregating the city. Our work has been focused on documenting properties subject to racially restrictive deed covenants, which barred the sale or rental of housing to African Americans.

Put simply, Mapping Segregation tells a powerful story. It uses traditional tools of evidence, many legal documents, photographs, and other archived materials. But it also leverages GIS and as the name suggests, powerfully illustrates the painful reality of Jim Crow’s stubborn legacy. If white Southerners have any pathological tendency, it is to convince themselves that the last major steps toward racial harmony were taken sometime in the last generation, always the last generation. The three presentations that form the heart of the project--what they call the “special exhibit”--form a potent prescription to that disease.

It is noteworthy that the scanned images of the deeds and the analytical narratives are necessary prerequisites to recognizing the full significance of the GIS work. The second presentation in particular, “Legal Challenges to Racially Restrictive Covenants” is extremely well designed, combining traditional scholarly writing with digital humanities tools, and a user-interface that is as aesthetically pleasing, for lack of a better term, as it is intuitive. Here is a sample:

My one quibble is that the landing page lacks a comprehensive survey of the project’s scope and aim--one has to explore a bit for the power and content of the material to come into focus. The project leaders, Sarah Shoenfeld and mara Cherkasky, would benefit from some reflection on what routes would get traffic to their site, and how they could compellingly grab visitors with the story from the landing page. Doing so could only help us to recover some of the forgotten alternatives to the racial acrimony and isolation we continue to suffer.

Holocaust Geographies

In April of 1993 the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened. As it closes out its third decade of operation, it still boasts an annual operating budget in excess of $100 million and continues to promote rich scholarship on the most infamous event in world history up to this point, hopefully ever. A little over a decade after the USHMM opened, its researchers “saw potential in GIS for managing and analyzing” enormous data sets they had compiled (p. 7). Marc Jean Masurovsky, a senior researcher at the museum, contacted Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Anne Kelly Knowles, to organize a workshop on using GIS analysis. “The two week workshop brought together nine scholars from historical geography, GIScience, cartography, history, and architectural history to consider how spatial analysis and geographical visualization of the built environment and forced movement of people during the Holocaust might inspire new research questions and pedagogical applications” (Geographical Review, “Geographies of the Holocaust,” p. 564).

Six essays ultimately resulted from the two years of research launched by that August 2007 workshop, and they are combined in Geographies of the Holocaust. In their introduction, the three organizing scholars summarize their distinct contribution in two clusters of dense text, dubiously combined below:

One of the most unusual aspects of our approach to the Holocaust is our conviction that spatial analysis and geovisualization can complement and help specify the humanistic understanding of space and place by exploring and quantifying relationships among things and people to discover and visualize spatial patterns of activity. This complementarity is at the core of our research method. […] By using these methods, we do not claim to be describing the reality of experience; rather, we have done something different by modeling the physical conditions of the reality in which victims, perpetrators, and bystanders operated, in order to ask new questions and see historical circumstances in a new light. (pp. 4-5, 8)

The key questions for me are:

1.     Are the new questions profound?

2.     Is the new light truly illuminating of human experience?

Alas, I’m afraid that the best I can offer is a hung jury on these questions. I fear that I selected the weakest case study for my test case, “Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: Spatialities of Ghettoization in Budapest” by Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano. Cole is a social historian and Giordano a professor of geography, and unfortunately they both seem to suffer from on of the most acute cases of hyper-specialization I have yet encountered in the academy.

Their geo-chronological frame is Budapest, Hungary, from May to November, 1944—one city for six months. Within their frame they show that Jews in Budapest were confined to ghettos that consisted of the traditional “Jewish” parts of town. Yellow starts were painted onto the sides of apartment buildings, and Jewish movement was increasingly confined, but they still lived fairly integrated within the city’s urban core. According to the authors, this runs contra to the grand narrative of “concentration and segregation” presented by Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of European Jews. To compare to a less academic source, the notion of the “dispersed ghetto” of Budapest contrasts sharply with the depiction of the ghetto of Krakow, Poland in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The essay is strongest when focusing on how this affected the experience of Budapest’s increasingly sequestered Jewish population. “Jews were segregated not only from non-Jews but also from other Jews, and from the means of survival, through the erection of invisible walls of distance” (p. 148). This is a valuable contribution.

Almost totally unaccountably, Cole and Giordano never state the obvious reason for Budapest’s anomalous status from the “classic” ghetto model: it was assembled ad hoc in the last year of the war. The Germans did not even being to implement the ghettoization process until June 16—ten days after the D-Day invasion that added the Western front to the Eastern and Southern. To be fair, they acknowledge that the ghettos were late in the war, but fail to identify that context as at least a major part of the explanation for why time and resources were not spent cordoning off several blocks of the city’s periphery to concentrate the tens of thousands of Jewish people who had not escaped by that point in the war. By this point Jewish victims—two thirds of which would not survive the year—would have looked at the Allied advance with hope, while their Gentile neighbors would have probably experienced some mixture of dread and ambivalence.

In the opening to their chapter, the authors note that Budapest was one of 150 Hungarian cities and towns that went through ghettoization in 1944. Four years after the publication of Holocaust Geographies, the USHMM published a list of 42,500 ghettos and camps. GIS has a role to play in helping to visualize these places and the people who lived within them, but it must not disregard the historical forest for the spatial trees, or one might say rather a different spatial forest. Otherwise the “complementarity” will be lost.