Author: jsibaja
For my project, I chose to explore the Mill Creek Valley and African American life in early 20th-century St. Louis walking tour. This tour was created by Lara Kelland, a Historian who is a professor of Museum Studies and Community History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The tour focuses on the history of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood, more specifically, the black history of the neighborhood and influential figures. With this information in mind, I think it is safe to assume that the intended audience for this walking tour is people from the St. Louis area or visitors who are looking to gain more insight into the history of St. Louis and its neighborhoods.
The project can be used as a walking or driving tour and is set up very similarly to a story map. It has a lot of different features integrated into it that aren’t always an option with a story map. This project features a text-to-speech function, photos, map coordinates, and even a street view of where a point is located. There is also a background information section that expands on the basic text of a slide and provides context to a specific location.
The project is a culmination of months of work. Although it was published in May of 2020, it appears that the earliest they began creating this project was sometime in February. The project has a lot of information, which I would say is a strength and a weakness because a lot is going on and even just looking at it can be slightly overwhelming. On the flip side because there is so much information you can learn a lot from just this one source. Another strength I find in this project is its accessibility. It is meant to be a walking tour, but the utilization of different maps, photos, street views, and the text-to-audio feature makes it so that a wide range of audiences can enjoy it and get a part of the experience, even if they cannot go out and do the walking or driving tour.
I enjoyed this project because I believe it enhanced my understanding of the St. Louis region. It provided a lot of information that I did not know and dived into the historical places and figures of the region, which can be used to make cultural connections to the area. I think it meshed well with my understanding of the region because St. Louis has a lot of prominent African American history, and it isn’t always talked about, but it plays a crucial role in the making of the city we know today.
For my data set, I examined the “Monthly and Seasonal Temperatures, St. Louis (since 1874).” Although there is no creator explicitly credited to this data set, it comes from a .gov website, so it is reasonable to infer that it is coming from the National Weather Service. The National Weather Service is a government department responsible for providing weather forecasts and warnings for the United States. No sources of data are stated either, but based on assumption, various tools were probably used to measure and collect temperature and other data. It was more than likely created to find what the average temperatures in St. Louis are by season, which makes me wonder if this data is also being used to examine topics such as climate change in the St. Louis region. The data is formatted in a table.
The data is structured in a table with the seasons and their corresponding months at the top and the years on the side. I think the data set is very inclusive of a lot of information because it includes the temperatures month by month and year by year, so there are a lot of different ways to use this information. This data could help answer questions about what the average temperature might be on a given day, how the temperature changes throughout the year, and at what rate, or even if there is climate change happening in the region.
Although the actual data seems to provide a decent amount of information, there is not a lot of information about where the data is coming from or who created it. There are definitely gaps in knowing how the data was cleaned, what it is supposed to be used for, and how the people creating it may have different perspectives and biases that impact how they collect and display data. I personally would use this data to predict temperatures for a given month and to explore climate change and how it is impacting the region.
After reviewing the syllabus and getting a feel for the different kinds of assignments we will be doing, I have found what I find sounds the most interesting and engaging for me.
I am really looking forward to our readings on the topic of ethics of representation. I am really looking forward to this because ethics is something that is very important to recognize and understand in any field but especially in a field like digital humanities.
Another topic that stood out to me was digitization. This can really tie into being a history major and digitizing different kinds of documents, but ain’t also sounds interesting because it says we’re going to be doing an activity about digitization and cultural heritage which sounds really interesting.
The final thing that peaked my interest were the weeks when we talk about maps and the weeks we talk about digital storytelling. I’m in school to become a historian so learning about maps is obviously gong to peak my interest, but digital storytelling is probably what I am most excited about. I like digital storytelling and the different elements that go into it because I feel like you can convey a lot of different messages through digital storytelling.
Hi! My name is Jaidyn, and I am a sophomore at SIUE. I am majoring in History with a double minor in Creative Writing & Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. My goal is to get my Ph.D. and do research eventually. I am a C.O.D.E. Scholar, which has impacted me tremendously as a student and opened up so many opportunities for me. I am most interested in African American History following Reconstruction. I also love seeing how all of the things I am doing in my different classes connect to each other.
Some of my favorite things to do outside of school are reading and writing, spending time with friends and family, and listening to music. I like to keep myself busy, so I do my best to stay involved on campus. I currently serve as the Vice President of Programming for my sorority. This means I have the privilege of working with our community service, philanthropy, and fundraising teams. When I am not doing any of these things you will more than likely find me with my friends watching bad reality T.V.
