Jan 25, 2024 Maggie Scholle, Fall 2023 DM Graduate Fellow, For the Birds?: Wastelanding at Lee Kay Ponds
I began my Digital Matters fellowship excited to represent stories from research and interviews I conducted for my Environmental Humanities thesis in an interactive, visual format. My thesis studies the social, environmental, and regulatory history of Lee Kay Conservation Area, public land on the far west side of Salt Lake City, and how the history of the land shapes interactions between humans and nonhumans in relationship with the place today.
This land has contained ephemeral wetlands for millennia, sometimes bisected by a meandering creek, and since the 1940s was used as a testing ground for 30- and 50- caliber munitions, then was used as a solid waste landfill, and then was dredged and used as conservation land with a mix of ephemeral and constructed wetlands. Today, it is visited and resided in by migratory birds and mule deer, and visited by communities of dog trainers, birders, and shooting sports enthusiasts. The stories I’ve heard and witnessed on the land are stories of resilience and flourishing and are also stories of wastelanding and contention that challenge ideas that military and landfill use can be entirely compatible with mainstream ideas of conservation.
I quickly realized that limited access to visual representations of the area’s past presented a barrier to using the methods of storytelling I wanted to explore, namely ArcGIS StoryMaps and digital collage. For example, the area was used as a landfill between 1983 and 1993, before Subtitle D standardized the disposal of solid waste, which makes it difficult to imagine what the land might have looked like during that time. I began my work in Digital Matters by using library resources in Special Collections to find historic maps of the area and learning from Justin in Creativity and Innovation Services about how to find aerial imagery of the area, dating back to the 1930s.
I spent the first half of the semester exploring different ways to visualize these primary sources and put them in conversation with each other, using narrative and my own images as connective tissue between them. Working separately with ArcGIS StoryMaps and digital collage made me realize that the two methods functioned better together than they did alone, particularly when I wanted to complicate the orders of layering on the land, visualizing them outside of a clear chronology or hierarchy. I began testing ways to integrate StoryMaps and collage, using aerial imagery as both a map overlay and a collage piece.
One of the greatest joys of the fellowship was learning about mapping in conversation with my peers in Digital Matters. Through our reading groups and conversations, I shed many long-held ideas about what a ‘proper’ map looks like and began to think of ways to make the subjectivity inherent in my mapping process clear to viewers. After these conversations, it became important to me to position my image layers building up upon each other, rather than digging into the map surface. Layering suggests that the future comes from acknowledging and making the past visible, rather than trying to return to it amidst an entirely new set of conditions. My project now blends StoryMaps and digital collage to “re-story” this landscape, narrating the story of the land, or a portion of it, from present to past to future.
As I end my semester with Digital Matters, I feel my project can serve as an example of a way to make a “layered landscape” visible, and I hope to give a panel presentation at Digital Humanities Utah on story mapping and digital collage as paired methods for public history. It’s important to acknowledge that with public history as my goal, this project is far from done. For the map to have an audience with and be useful to people who presently use and care about the area, it needs to include more of their stories, and expose not only obscured physical pasts, but the contested social present. I hope that as I fold more narrative into it, the map will serve both as a celebration of resilience and a sort of jumping-off point for negotiating the area’s future, considering a range of human and nonhuman perspectives.