Author: ymohame

The Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis project was made by a team of historians and students at Washington University in St. Louis. The main goal of this project is to show where LGBTQ people lived, worked, and socialized between 1945 and 1992. By putting these locations on a map, the researchers want to prove that queer history is a part of the city’s regular history and not something separate. The project is meant for students, local residents, and anyone interested in how St. Louis grew over time.

The researchers used a technology called ArcGIS to create an interactive map with over 800 locations. They found these places by looking through old newspapers, police records of bar raids, and underground travel guides from the past. The project concludes that the location of LGBTQ spaces was not random. Instead, these spaces were shaped by the border between Missouri and Illinois. Because Missouri had strict laws, the Illinois East Side became a very important place for nightlife and drag shows.

One major strength of the project is that it shows how race and segregation affected the community. It clearly explains that Black and white LGBTQ people often had to stay in separate neighborhoods because of the city’s racial divides. A weakness is that the project mostly shows public businesses like bars, so it misses out on private house parties or people who kept their lives hidden. This project shows that the Metro-East was a place of freedom for people who could not be themselves in Missouri. It adds a lot of context to how the St. Louis region was divided by laws and race, making the local history feel much more complete.

Data might seem like simple facts that just exist, but people actually build and shape it. For this post, I looked at the Illinois Landcover in the Early 1800s data set. This data set tries to show what the land in Illinois looked like before big cities, modern roads, and industrial farms changed everything.

Data Set Profile

• Creators: This was made by the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS). They are scientists who study the plants and animals of Illinois.
• Sources: They used old government land maps from the 1800s made by the General Land Office.
• Why it was made: To help scientists see what nature was like originally so they can try to fix or protect it today.
• How it is used: People use it to see how much forest or prairie has been lost over time.
• Format: It is mostly found as digital map files called GIS Shapefiles.

---

Data Set Evaluation

The way this data is set up is very simple. It puts land into categories like Prairie, Forest, or Wetland. The problem is that nature is not usually that neat. By using these strict labels, the data makes it look like there were clear lines between different areas, even though they actually blended together in real life. This structure makes it easy for a computer to read, but it might oversimplify how the environment really worked.

The creators had to clean up the data because the old 1800s maps were sometimes messy or did not agree with each other. This means the modern scientists had to make their own guesses. For example, what one person back then called a swamp, another person might have called a wet prairie. These choices change how the final map looks today. If the scientists chose one label over another, it might hide some of the small, important details of the original land.

We also have to think about who made the original maps. The surveyors in the 1800s were not scientists; they were government workers trying to divide the land so it could be sold. They mostly cared about what the land could be used for, like farming or finding wood for building houses. Because of this, they probably ignored how Indigenous people managed the land with things like controlled fires.

This makes the data set a map of what the government wanted to use, not just a map of pure nature. I would use this data to compare how much the state has changed since the 1800s, but I would remember that it is just one point of view. It is a helpful tool for class, but it shows the land through the eyes of people who saw it as property to be owned.

How do we define “community” across a river and a state line? I use Voyant Tools, to perform a distant reading of two distinct locations in our region: St. Louis, MO and Edwardsville, IL.

By shifting from a close reading to a quantitative view ), we can see the skeletons of how these places are described in historical and modern encyclopedic entries.

---

The Texts & The Question

For this analysis, I compared two comprehensive overview texts:

1. Text A: History of St. Louis
2. Text B: Edwardsville, Illinois

My Research Question: Does the language used to describe “community” in a major urban center like St. Louis differ fundamentally from the language used for a smaller, satellite city like Edwardsville?

The Hypothesis

After skimming the texts, I noticed St. Louis is often framed through global spectacle and social friction (the World’s Fair, segregation, industrial power), while Edwardsville is framed through foundational lineage and institutional growth (settlers, the University, local industry).

Hypothesis: When compared in Voyant, the St. Louis corpus will show a higher frequency of words related to power, spectacle, and social division, whereas the Edwardsville corpus will emphasize stability, education, and individual pioneers.

---

The Results:

I uploaded both texts into Voyant. To test the hypothesis, I primarily used the Summary and Bubblelines tools.

1. Word Cloud (Cirrus)

In the St. Louis text, terms like world, fair, city, and exposition dominated. Interestingly, words like segregation and space appeared with high density, supporting the idea of social friction. In the Edwardsville text, the dominant terms were county, university, settlers, and industry.

2. Comparison

The Bubblelines tool allows us to see where specific terms appear across the timeline of the text.

• Industry vs. Education: In Edwardsville, education and university (SIUE) appear as a massive bubble toward the end of the text, signifying it as a modern community anchor. In St. Louis, industry and spectacle are concentrated in the middle (the Fair era).
• People vs. Names: Edwardsville’s text is heavily populated with specific surnames (Edwards, Stephenson, Kirkpatrick), suggesting a community built on biographical lineage. St. Louis’s text uses more collective or abstract terms like visitors, organizers, or groups.

---

Conclusions

The data largely supports the hypothesis. Distant reading reveals that the identity of St. Louis in these texts is one of transformation and tension—a city trying to prove itself on a global stage. Conversely, Edwardsville’s identity is portrayed as incremental and institutional, defined by its transition from a settler outpost to a regional educational hub.

Through Voyant, we can see that community isn’t just a feeling; it’s a specific vocabulary. For St. Louis, community is often defined by how it manages (or fails to manage) its masses. For Edwardsville, community is defined by the names on its street signs and the growth of its local institutions.

I ran the SIUE Homepage (siue.edu) through the WAVE tool.

, The following issues appeared:

• Low Contrast Errors: Some text (often small footer links or text overlaid on banners) does not have a high enough contrast ratio against its background.
• Missing Alternative (Alt) Text: Certain decorative icons or news images may lack descriptive text, leaving them invisible to screen readers.
• Redundant Links: Adjacent links (like an image and a text headline) often lead to the same URL, which can be repetitive for keyboard users.
• Heading Structure Alerts: Some sections might skip heading levels (e.g., jumping from an <h1> to an <h3>), which can confuse the table of contents view used by assistive tech.

The primary audience includes:

• Prospective Students: Looking for admission requirements and campus life info.
• Current Students & Faculty: Accessing portals like Blackboard or CougarNet.
• Community Members: Seeking dental clinic services or regional event information.

These issues impede access by:

• Low Contrast: This most heavily impacts users with low vision or color blindness. If the contrast ratio is below $4.5:1$, the text might blend into the background, making it unreadable.
• Missing Alt Text: This primarily affects blind or visually impaired users who rely on screen readers. Instead of hearing Students studying in the Quad, the device might simply say image or read a cryptic filename like DSC_001.jpg.
• Navigational Issues: Users with motor disabilities who navigate via tabbing on a keyboard may find redundant links frustrating, as they have to press Tab twice as many times to get through a list of news items.

Improvements: Small & Easy Fixes

1. Darken the Gray: A very simple fix is to adjust the CSS of light gray text to a slightly darker shade. Moving a hex code from a light gray to a darker charcoal can immediately resolve dozens of contrast errors without changing the site’s look.
2. Add Descriptive Alt Tags: For any image that conveys information (like a Apply Now button), ensure the alt="..." attribute is filled with a clear, concise description. It takes seconds in a CMS but makes the content 100% more accessible to screen reader users.

The Cahokia AR app is a cool way to see history come to life. It uses your phone to show what the ancient city looked like 1,000 years ago, turning empty fields into a busy town with buildings and walls. This is great for people who learn better by seeing things rather than just reading signs. It also helps visitors learn about the site while the main museum building is closed for repairs.

However, the app isn’t perfect for everyone. Since it costs money and needs a modern smartphone, it leaves out people who can’t afford the price or don’t have the newest tech. Also, because you have to walk around the huge park to use it, people with mobility issues might find it hard to use. It’s a great tool for seeing the past, but the cost and tech requirements mean not everyone can join in on the experience.

Living in Minneapolis, it is hard to ignore the massive highways like I-35W that cut the city into pieces. When I walk over the bridges, I always wonder: Why were these huge roads built right through the middle of our neighborhoods? The context is that decades ago, the city decided to plow these highways through busy, lived-in areas to make it easier for people to drive in and out of downtown. To do this, they tore down thousands of homes and split communities in half. Even now, you can be standing on a nice sidewalk and hear the constant roar of cars right below you. It feels like the city was built for traffic instead of for the people who actually live here.

You should care because these roads act like invisible walls. They decide which parts of the city are loud and polluted and which parts stay quiet. If we want Minneapolis to feel like a real community again, we have to look at how these old decisions still keep us separated today.

Choosing Annalee Newitz’s “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” highlights a weird truth: we usually treat AI as either a helpful neighbor or a terrifying god. There’s rarely a middle ground. In Newitz’s story, the AI (Robot) isn’t some cold, calculating brain in a box. It’s more like a humble social worker.

The author assumes that the world is messy and broken, but that technology can be a bridge. By having the Robot “talk” to crows to stop a plague, Newitz argues that AI shouldn’t just be about “data”—it should be about connection.

The ethical weight here is placed on community. The AI is only “good” because it helps humans and animals survive together. On the flip side, Clarke’s story treats AI like a spiritual shortcut.

The monks use a computer to list all the names of God, assuming that once the “data entry” of the universe is finished, the world can end. The AI here has zero personality; it’s just a high-speed calculator for the divine. It suggests that humans are impatient and that technology is the ultimate tool for skipping the hard work of existence.

How this fits today: Newitz’s Robot feels like the AI we want: something that helps us solve real-world problems like sickness or climate change by listening to things we ignore. Clarke’s Computer feels like the AI we have: a machine that can crunch numbers and generate results at a speed that feels almost supernatural, but doesn’t actually understand the “why” behind the task.

The creators of these stories make a big argument: technology isn’t just about the hardware. It’s about what we ask it to do. If we ask it to help us survive, it becomes a partner. If we ask it to solve the “meaning of life” through pure math, we might not like the answer it gives us

I’m really looking forward to our classes next week on AI Imaginaries and AI Technologies. It’s going to be interesting to see the gap between the “sci-fi” version of AI and how the tech actually works in the real world.

The Monday session on AI fiction is definitely the highlight for me. I love how movies and books shape our ideas about the future—sometimes making us more scared or excited than we probably should be. I’m curious to see if the “fictional” problems it shows are anything like the real technical challenges we’ll talk about on Wednesday.

I want to use this semester to figure out if our worries about AI come from the actual technology or if we’ve just watched too many movies! It’ll be fun to see where the line between imagination and reality really sits.

Hello! My name is Yosef. I am interested in talking about how digital humanities encourage us to think critically about the technologies we us in our daily lives and how we are able to incorporate that in a world where AI is becoming prevalent and useful.