Rachael Lanning: Spatial History

    I have been researching akaline-glazed stoneware production in South Carolina for about a year and a half now. In all that time, I have yet to find any source that maps all of the 19th century potteries making the stoneware in one place. In fact, there are hardly any historic maps that do so either. An important part of my project from the start has been understanding the spatial relationships between the potteries, and the users and consumers of the products. For instance, at what is today Sesquicentennial State Park, the individuals living there used alkaline-glazed stoneware, sherds of the vessels were found during archaeological projects there. These individuals were enslaved, and then tenant farmers.  The main place where the product was being produced was in various potteries in Edgefield, South Carolina however, pottery was being made in Columbia as early as the 1830s, which has been proved using primary source research. My goal is to map all of these potteries...

  Kernel Densities and Mean Centers of Emigrant Loans before/after 1900 in New York City In all honesty, I have more questions about the data set now than I did before the project, but I guess that is what history is about, so maybe I have gone in the right direction. I would first like to note that I also generated and looked at the Near Table but decided not to add much about it here since I there is already a lot from this series of maps I have here now. I originally tried to think about some grand way to designate time differences, but I decided it would be most valuable to choose a time bin that everyone could be familiar with. So, I chose the turn of the century to show the differences in loan densities for emigrant individuals in New York City. I first looked at the overall kernel density for loans, which we also looked at in class. This showed the most expensive and concentrated loans in the East Village area. Notice the mean centers for all three of the time delineations, ...

GIS Milestone I was pretty proud of the maps I made for the milestone, so I spent this weekend cleaning up the formatting and making them easier to read and understand. One of the mistakes I made during the milestone was not including the Rosenwald Schools indicated by the numbers on the map, I did not see that they were schools, I thought they were just the cities. Now the Rosenwald map should reflect the true numbers a little bit better. I also did not add the 30-mile buffer that I added the first time, honestly to see what the difference looked like. I tried to be consistent with color coding to make the maps flow nicely, and I tried to stay in the same color scheme so as to not make one map stand out more than the others. I also hope that my legends are as clear as possible, I tried to change the wording of some of those so that they made more sense than they may have in my milestone.

 I would recommend treating this as more of a slide show than one single post, I created a lot of maps and it would be a little confusing to see them all at once, they are all labeled with the correct information about them. I noticed a distinct pattern, with more hurricanes in the Southeast, and more tornadoes in the Midwest. This is consistent with expectations, at least with what I know about weather. The first map for each set, tornadoes vs. hurricanes, shows the join count as a graduated choropleth map, the darker the orange/red, the more hurricanes were recorded in that county between the years that the hurricanes were recorded (1851-2016). Tornadoes, the same is true in purple for the first map. These were recorded in the years (1950-2023).  I have considered that it doesn't make sense to include the population compared to tornadoes from 1900 and 1940, but I think it is still a useful comparison, assuming the weather patterns did not change to drastically in those 50 ye...

  I am so glad I followed through and did not give up while making this! The instructions were obviously very long, and while not complicated, I really wanted to make sure I was making everything properly. I am honestly very proud of the outcome. I appreciated the explanations in the tutorial that said why exactly some changes to the map were being made, for instance, changing the scale of the y-axis on the chart to make it less misleading. There are definitely things in this tutorial that I will continue into my personal mapmaking in rest of the semester.

  Map showing dwellings, food/retail locations, vacant buildings, and other locations in the Gervais Street Vista district. Georeferenced Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of the desired location. I chose to look back at the Sanborn maps because I work with the maps in archaeology a lot, but usually after they have already been georeferenced and interpreted. For the most part, I have just used them to determine where good places to start digging shovel tests and test unites might be. I think it will be useful for my future in the field to know how to do the preliminary mapping. Mostly, I wanted to compare the Sanborn map with the area today. What I mostly noticed was the number of dwellings I was mapping. Even as I was in the process of adding them to the feature class, I realized that it was a clear majority. I find this interesting because in the Vista area today, it is mostly retail, shopping, and dining, and the only dwellings are multistory apartment buildings, much different than th...