Category: Uncategorized (Page 6 of 17)
My problem statement is the environmental impacts on poorer redlined communities of St. Louis caused by the city’s industrial parks, predominantly populated by minorities. In other words, the lower income residents of St. Louis’s neighborhoods experiencing health complications such as asthma, lead poisoning, air poisoning, etc. due to their proximity to factories emitting high levels of pollution and waste. What drew me to this issue is my interest in the socioeconomic conditions of how cities are planned and constructed. How larger cities plan residential neighborhoods can determine the economic outcomes of millions of people making the issue a priority. I also empathize with the minorities who have unjustly suffered as most of them have, most likely, been the blue collared workers employing the factories and supplying profits for the corporations who have failed to assist and support them in return. I am approaching the problem as an outsider to St. Louis with limited to no background in the structure of St. Louis. It is important to note that I, myself, am not a member of a minority group and am approaching from an outsider’s perspective, in that respect and the privilege that comes with it. This problem is also well suited for digital humanities. Due to the problem centering around the geography and layout of the city, maps, diagrams, and other visual resources will be very helpful. It is not only helpful for me but helps the audience understand the severity of the problem without large paragraphs of text. A visual timeline would be helpful to convey how the neighborhoods have changed over time in relation to the factories causing the health issues experienced. Even further, color could be utilized in distinguishing the different neighborhoods and layout of the city socioeconomically to demonstrate how the upper-class residents were not affected by the pollution and waste. For research purposes, this issue has been well documented spanning decades of potential sources.
Primary Source: https://www.environmentalracismstl.com/
Secondary Source: https://source.washu.edu/2019/09/environmental-racism-in-st-louis/
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.
My spatial analysis highlights disparities in access to Black hair care resources in Edwardsville compared to Fairview Heights, forcing Black residents and SIUE students to travel for culturally specific products, which is inconvenient and costly. This reflects spatial injustice, where resources are unevenly distributed due to factors like demographics, economic barriers, and institutional biases that limit Black-owned businesses’ presence in predominantly white areas. The lack of access affects Black students, faculty, and staff by making daily hair care more difficult while also limiting diversity and inclusivity in the broader community. Addressing this issue could involve financial incentives for Black-owned businesses, SIUE partnerships with local stores, and policy changes to support minority-owned businesses in diverse locations.
Data set profile:
- Who is credited as the creator and/or contributors of this data set? Who are they?
- The Project Coordinators are listed as Rebecca Maloney, National Tombstone Project Coordinator, and Debra Crosby, Tombstone Photo Project Coordinator. Though there isn’t a single person listed as the creator, the contributors are meant to be volunteers, and to donate the data to the USGenWeb Project Archives of their area. The specific tombstone project I looked at was the Upper Sect 101 in Alton Cemetery in Alton, Illinois, which was led by someone named Sue Williams.
- What are the sources of their data?
- The web site lists that the source of the data should be the graveyard/cemetery itself, and should be organized according to the layout or plot of the grave. The site explains that cleaning may need to be done in order to accurately plot. Plotting the graveyard or cemetery might need to be done before transcribing the graves, since not every site will have a layout to use.
- Why did they create or compile it?
- There is a stress on compiling data for preservation purposes, as well as for access, but also as a “tribute to our ancestors.”
- How has it been used?
- It seems as if it is primarily used for genealogical purposes, as well as just for data preservation.
- What format is the data set in?
- It is a raw text file that has tombstones labeled by sect, with all included text (name, birth/death dates, inscriptions) and in some of the files descriptions of the stone or marker.
Data set evaluation:
- Take a look at the data itself. How have they structured it? What fields have they chosen? What effect might that have on how it can be used?
- The data is really just a string of data, seemingly dumped into a text file just going down the line, with the first “column” of data having a number to denote the order in which the graves were plotted, and the second “column” containing information about what the text of the inscription says, and maybe a description of the stone or marker. Since the data only has the two columns, it is a little hard to parse through, and difficult to read since it is a very narrow and long “document.”
- Read the creators’ description of the data set. Have they described the choices they made in cleaning the data, and if so, how? What effect might those choices have on the data?
- There are rules for submitting data files on the Illinois county portal (three links are provided, but they all go to the same page). There are multiple types of data submission forms, depending on the way in which the data is being used, and what is being recorded.
- Consider the creators’ identities and goals in creating the data set. How might those things have shaped the data, either intentionally or inadvertently?
- I think that it is heavily focused on preservation for posterity, which is interesting – I would love to know more about the inception of the site, as it started in 1997, and where the person was located. Culturally speaking, I know that there are a few different communities wherein ancestor and family mapping is really popular (The Church of Latter Day Saints/Mormons chief among them) however this is a project that I’m not super familiar with. I know that there are a few influencers on TikTok whose primary content is restoration of stones in graveyards/cemeteries, and in doing so they often will provide information about the person, and their life and death, should they have it. I think that because the project focuses on data consolidation, unintentionally it removes the data from the people it is intended to preserve, as it doesn’t include anything about their lives.
- What would you use this data for?
- As I mentioned, there are people who volunteer and help to restore and preserve the physical graves, so this information would be helpful long term for keeping record of sites that have deteriorated past reading. I think that this is a helpful project for contextualizing death, as a society that has a hard time reconciling death, as a death avoidant culture.