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!