Mar 25, 2024 Theadora Soter, Fall 2023 DM Undergraduate Intern, Mapping the Projects

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

I view this project as divided into three areas of research that all work together to create the context needed to understand the purpose and goals of the project as a whole. I’ve spent a great deal of time this semester studying these three areas and I want to share a bit of each of them with you. First, the practice of mapping literature (short stories, novels, and poetry) within humanities scholarship and how it pertains to this project in particular. Next, the complex and nuanced history of American public housing throughout the last century tries to paint a more complete picture of the societal effects of public housing. Lastly, the literature that takes place in public housing.

The point of counter-mapping, which mapping literature is directly linked to, is to challenge power structures that have made maps that society accepts as fact. By highlighting understandings of space that are commonly overshadowed by the dominant perspective, which generally happens to be that of a white man, critical cartography reveals that space looks different depending on the position of the viewer. Mapping the projects is a prime example of counter-cartography in the sense that we’re hoping to provide viewers with a more complete understanding of public housing in America from the perspective of the people who know the space best — people who called these spaces home. 

What I’ve come to learn while doing this research is that space is arbitrary and only becomes meaningful when given a narrative; a humanistic perspective. When this happens space becomes place. By giving you an incomplete and generalized overview of the history of public housing spaces, I hope that you’ll be better able to understand why it’s important that we view these spaces as the places that they once were. As a result of white flight, the Housing Act of 1949 was passed which led to urban renewal within big cities across the country. This led to high rises replacing tenements because they were financially efficient to build and fit lots of people but because a majority of those people were African American or immigrants from other countries, the government didn’t feel that it was necessary to maintain these buildings. This eventually led to the passing of legislation in 1996 that allowed for the destruction of 57,000 public housing units across the country. This destruction led to the displacement of thousands of African Americans whose homes were destroyed with no replacement. The destruction of these homes was not just the destruction of buildings but also the destruction of communities, families, friendships, and homes.

The third and final aspect of this project is to restore the place of American public housing despite its space being destroyed through the use of narrative and, more specifically, literature. By mapping the literature that came out of public housing, the hope is that its legacy will be respected and treated as places that were homes not merely spaces that had names on a map. It turns out that this literature is hard to find because it is rarely cataloged under a simple search like “public housing literature.” This obstacle required the creation of a comprehensive list of search terms in hopes of locating the literature we were hoping to find. The next step required us to create a metadata schema in line with the Dublin Core guidelines and include elements from title and author to names and nicknames for the particular housing project being discussed in the work. By using this schema we were able to compile a database of 63 published works of literature. At this point, we realized we had to make a map from the database we had found rather than adding the information from our database to an already existing map. By using Toya Wolfe’s “Last Summer on State Street” as a case study I have spent the latter half of this semester playing with the potential ways to map this narrative and the findings have been very exciting. 

Our immediate next step is to locate the imagery of Robert Taylor’s homes (where “Last Summer on State Street” took place) while simultaneously creating narration to visualize the protagonist’s mentioned places in hopes of representing the people who had similar experiences. We hope to do this by using Esri’s story maps to create an interactive map where viewers can visualize “The Last Summer on State Street.” After that, we hope to continue to add the rest of the literature in the database to the story map in the hopes of having a complete, interactive map documenting the public housing literature of America throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. By the end of this academic year, the hope is that we will be able to add the interactive and comprehensive story map into a web interface where users will be able to add their narratives to the map in an attempt to further archive and document the complete story of public housing from those who have experienced it. 

How did the Digital Matters Faculty Grant dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

This project is really at the intersection of both my academic and professional goals. I hope to have a career in digital librarianship, where I will be able to make less-known cultural stories and histories available to the public through digital practices. By working in a library environment on a project that merges historical scholarship with literary scholarship, I have been able to get a taste of what my future work can, and hopefully will, include. 

What would you tell potential faculty grant applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

I would tell potential faculty to trust their students and interns and work with them rather than having them work for you. This has been my experience and as a result, I think me and my faculty mentor were able to collaborate on the project to make it even more robust.

What do you see as the upcoming important issues surrounding digital scholarship in your field? What areas/issues could students and scholars investigate to extend their knowledge in this area?

The biggest issue I see with this project in relation to digital scholarship is the barrier to access. Individuals who want to interact with this project will require the technology to do so. That said, I think that if marketed appropriately there will be many organizations and institutions that will be willing and eager to share this project with their own communities.