In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial—the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo—dominates the landscape. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there for Texas independence and that their sacrifice will never be forgotten. The didactics urge the public to observe this history with solemnity and reverie.

Yet the story is one-sided. While there were many root causes of the Alamo siege, one of the most important was that Texas Anglos were fighting Mexican soldiers to uphold slavery. In San Antonio, as in many other cities, the histories of Latinx and Black communities are overshadowed by Anglo-dominated narratives.

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed prompted a national reckoning with commemoration. Communities began to think about what to do with controversial, often racist, statues, markers, and place names. Many wanted their landscapes to tell a different story—one that did not venerate racial violence.

The targets of these conversations have been mainly physical plaques and statues—but the resolutions are far more varied. New digital tools let scholars, students, and community members create new, and newly inclusive, forms of memorialization. Hitching historical research to new digital technologies helps tell different, more inclusive, and more nuanced narratives about the past. Malleable digital technologies can be much more creative and responsive than stone statues, soldiers in bronze, or iron plaques. In season three of “Western Edition,” the podcast we host at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, we highlight some of these innovative efforts across the West, including in San Antonio.

One of these is the digital history project Mapping the Movimiento. Created by professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio and its Special Collections Library, the project functions like a “bus tour of San Antonio civil rights locations,” history professor Omar Valerio Jiménez says. Anyone in San Antonio with a smartphone can use the interactive map.

Mapping the Movimiento’s 15 sites span the 20th century. They include Edgewood High School, an anchor for the city’s Mexican American West Side and focus of important judicial rulings about public school funding inequities, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in the late 1980s by Chicano and other activists working toward social justice in San Antonio and beyond.

Mario Cantú’s family restaurant is on the map, too. “Anybody who was anybody in the Chicano movement when they came to San Antonio met at Mario’s,” says historian Jerry Gonzalez. Known as “the first eating space in San Antonio to desegregate its food counter,” the restaurant served as a vital social hub for the city’s Mexican American community in the 1950s. Today, the restauarant building has been demolished and the land upon which it once stood is part of the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio. No physical plaque marks the space. Visitors to Mapping the Movimiento’s website can see artifacts and images from the restaurant’s heyday and learn how Cantú became a key figure in the city’s Chicano and civil rights activist communities.

Similarly, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists, an initiative of Texas A&M University–San Antonio historian Pamela Walker, uses digital mapping to commemorate the sites and experiences of Black San Antonians during the Jim Crow era. In partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum and the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation, Walker’s team of student-researchers reconstructed the histories of more than 20 locations included in the Green Books—gazetteers that mapped safe tourist destinations for Black travelers in the Jim Crow era. QR codes placed around the city connect passersby to a digital map of Black San Antonio and a richly researched essay for each featured site.

One of Walker’s students, James Thomas, researched the Carter Undertaking Company, a funeral home at 601 Center Street. Now called the Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary, the institution has been continuously operated and family-owned since 1906, and its funeral directors played a crucial role in social justice work of the mid-20th century. Black-owned businesses provided Black families with financial stability, enabling protests against Jim Crow Era abuses and helping in turn to provide safety nets for neighbors, Thomas writes. They provided for elders “who weren’t getting the proper care that they needed,” and contributed in significant ways to “build a better community on the East side for the African Americans.”

Like Mapping the Movimiento, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists includes sites that still exist and sites that have disappeared from the city. Reading the Green Books in present day offers a glimpse into the vibrant world of Black San Antonio during the era of Jim Crow, but also shows how much of it had been lost to urban renewal. For instance, student Delaney Byrom researched the former State Theater, which hosted plays and movies from 1929 to 1960 at 209 North Main, now the site of a parking lot.

Byrom spoke with patrons of the theater such as Walter Dykes, now in his 90s, who watched films there as a child—dressed up for the occasion in a tie, but still mischievously inclined toward throwing popcorn and making noise. Byrom’s grandmother, Liana Reyes, also frequented the theater as a teen. She remembers it as a segregated place, where she—a Mexican American—could sit in the front, but Black patrons had to enter through the back and sit in the balcony.

Walker hopes her project’s digital markers will be a first step to giving the stories of Black San Antonians “a permanent footprint on the landscape.” Digital memorialization initiatives are important, she says, because, when it comes to historical markers and sites, “there have been far too many communities, especially Black communities and communities of color, who haven’t been able to have a say in [creating memorials that reflect] what’s important to them.”

The landscape of memory and commemoration and race is shifting in the U.S., thanks to historians, students, activists, and community members who are reimagining it in exciting and innovative ways. Pairing grassroots historical research with emerging digital technologies democratizes: It allows communities, individuals, and institutions that have for far too long been left out of public history-making and memory to see their stories heard and respected. The questions Mapping the Movimiento and Safe Spots for Negro Motorists’ researchers grapple with—concerning race, belonging, and legitimacy—lie at the heart of a healthy American democracy, one that can link memory and reckoning.

The post In San Antonio, Remembering More Than the Alamo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“You will pass a shop, called only ‘J.P.,’
That sells the most beautiful scarves, in any season;
I always – you can just glance if you want,
But I always stop to look, though I have to avoid the manager
Because I told him that sometimes I – ha ha! – sometimes it takes all of my strength,
From the hospital, not to break that window!

“You will pass – and this is where I start to skip –
A morose jazz club,
Where the melancholy spills out onto the street
With the music and the smoke,
Where I once saw a bunch of children – this was years ago –
Five of them, all germinating verve and towheaded androgyny,
Skipping down the cobblestone, hand in hand, laughing, and it looked
As if the smokers outside were vermillion with jealousy –
Or maybe just the cold –
Anyway, I remember them and skip for them, now;
I think that’s important.

“It’s important that we keep skipping, or – well, anyway, that I do,
Because you will pass the casino, and the old men in the windows
At the machines, exchanging misery;
They will look at you, so look back, and they will spit at you, so never stop
Skipping; you must be resolute, or I – I must be resolute, when they see me.

“I think it is a cruel thing, to be happy.”

Glasses off, and on.

“Sorry, I hope you’re not in a rush,
It’s just so wonderful to see you smiling, and breathless,
And I know you pay attention, so I told you all that.
You look so happy here – like a beaming cartoon! Not like last year,
By the Mylar, in that dark apartment –
You look like you want to be free.”

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Many of the maps are astoundingly intricate, yet leave room for the imagination. With vastly different styles, some maps are whimsical, others feature gorgeous calligraphy, and many are witty. (Case in point: the map titled “Voyage of the Goblin Showing How She Went Across and Came Back” notes that “Her Outward Track Is Marked Only Approximately Because They Did Not Know How to Allow for the Tides and Their Steering Was Rather Uncertain.”) A number of them also give a window into the process of writing, like the map Jack Kerouac sketched for On the Road long before he wrote the novel.

The essays reveal the intimacies hidden in the maps: Charlotte Brontë’s brother Branwell, a painter, drew a map based on a land she had imagined years earlier. Treasure Island was inspired by a map Robert Louis Stevenson created to entertain his stepson. William Faulkner, though, drew his own maps of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

The post The Fictional Maps That Fill Us With Wonder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More recently, Grant Oliveira, a data analytics consultant with an interest in the origins of philosophical thought, embarked on a project to corral the universe of philosophers that exist on the web, namely via their Wikipedia profiles. That project—which took about two weeks—yielded flawed but promising results.

Looking at these two projects together—one the product of decades of deep gathering of ideas, the other the harvesting of crowd-sourced data—provides some interesting contrasts that in themselves shed light on how ideas are born and perpetuated.

For Collins, his personal networks influenced the project. Early in his career he worked with an Israeli professor, Joseph Ben-David, who was studying the origins of modern science. His mentor explained how the German research universities created the model imitated by England, France, and the U.S.

Collins researched the networks of Islamic thinkers in the 8th through 12th century. Courtesy of Randall Collins.

“I had been a philosophy student before sociology so I was interested in people like Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, and I knew they were connected in a network,” Collins said. “As I read more about it, I realized these were the leaders of the revolution to upgrade the medieval university into a research university. I had also studied the social history of the world religions.

“I went to Zen programs up in the mountains near Los Angeles and found out that the famous Zen Masters were in the same kind of networks too. I made a point of learning Chinese and Japanese history as well as the history of education in Western societies. The networks gave me a gestalt for holding it all together. I traveled to historic sites around the world, and tried to meet the experts in each area. They usually weren’t interested in networks per se. But knowing the key people helped in finding out what they considered the key literature, until I began to feel some closure in the project. That’s why it took me 25 years to do this.”

Collins map of the relationships between philosophers in 11th and 12th century China. Zhu Xi, the philosopher represented by the red dot in the center, is the most influential scholar of the Neo-Confucians.
Courtesy of Randall Collins.

Oliveira used Wikipedia to create an algorithm to identify philosophers, the era that they lived in, and the networks they were part of, including who influenced them and who they influenced. Because some philosophers on Wikipedia may have additional or alternative categories, he acknowledges that this network is not authoritative and has some weaknesses.

An interactive version of Grant Oliveira’s “Philosopher’s Web”. Click the 3 dots on the left to expand. For optimal experience, view on desktop or open a new tab here.

A future update will see the inclusion of other, non-Western philosophers that are categorized differently on Wikipedia. As with all data products, he says, “you should take this with a grain of salt.”

As for his own networks of influence, Oliveira’s academic background is in political science, but the network that influenced him was in data science. He explains: “I got my first grounding from online certificate courses offered by Johns Hopkins taught by Roger Peng, Jeff Leak, and Brian Caffo. They were all influences of mine. I’ve also taken courses by Andrew Ng who worked for Google on machine learning. I follow Gareth James of USC and the rest of the co-authors of An Introduction to Statistical Learning.”

The post Mapping Big Thinkers and Their Ideas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

 
Q: What did your research on creativity show about the conditions that are necessary for big sticky ideas?

A: I started working on networks of philosophers and mathematicians because those are the intellectual types that go furthest back into world history. Over 25 years, I charted the networks of around 3,000 philosophers and mathematicians in China, India, and ancient Greece as well as modern societies. I traced who was connected to whom and who were rivals in disputes. Also, I ranked them by how eminent they were in the literature.

My main finding was that creativity tends to cluster. The more eminent the thinker, the more eminent people are clustered together. Someone who has a really enormous impact tends to have a lot of important people upstream, as well as having important downstream followers.

What does all this mean? The most important thing people learn from their mentors or teachers is how to ask new questions. Creative thinkers are those who move to an entirely new way of conceiving a question. The questions are more important than the answers. Once a question is posed, new answers become possible.

Q: Did the time that this was happening have any bearing on the eminence of their philosophy?

A: In general, there’s no such thing as a golden age of civilization. An important century for cultural creativity is not necessarily one when your army is conquering other countries or even if it’s a time of prosperity.

What is important is change in the organizational base intellectuals live in. Take Kant and his network—there were half a dozen major philosophers in Germany at that time. This was when universities were reformed from being dominated by theology, to making the philosophical faculty the main field for advanced degrees, and requiring professors to carry out new research. Out of this faculty, most modern research fields developed. Intellectually, the 19th century is the German century. Why? Because they invented the research university. The first generation were philosophical idealists but materialist positions developed in an academic fight to split off a natural science faculty from the philosophical faculty. Internal fights—over creating a new organizational base—open up possibilities and energize people to create new things.

Q: Today we’re electronically networked in every way. Does it follow then that the pace of innovation will speed up, or do you think that the noise of all of the connections gets in the way?

A: It’s more the latter than the former. Ancient philosophers and mathematicians had to meet face to face. You had to be there in Athens or wherever in order to have that network connection. But as printing came in, the network patterns didn’t change. Jean Paul Sartre could have dealt with people in South America by mail, but meetings in cafes were still at the core. The networks around Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still face to face networks. Even when long-distance media exist, the advantage is in dealing with key people face to face. It is faster as well more intuitive and emotional.

Creative people put a lot of emotional force into their ideas. [Steve] Jobs is a terrific example of that. Einstein and other intellectual heroes tend to be emotionally overpowering and you can’t get that just by reading their writing.

I’ll add one other element: creativity is a competitive process. I coined the term “law of small numbers” for the pattern of famous philosophers and mathematicians. You never get one isolated great thinker at a time; there tend to be two or three as rivals of one another. If the number goes above six or seven, nobody pays attention to the people who come into the network beyond that. It’s as if we can only pay attention to about half a dozen positions at once. Creativity is a struggle to build on the network but to make your own position distinctive so that it attracts followers.

Q: Did a network pick up your idea and run with it?

A: Yes, although in ways that I’ve found a bit surprising. The people who like it the most are network researchers and evolutionary biologists. The people who like it the least are philosophers. (Laughing).

The post You Never Get One Isolated Great Thinker at a Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This project, called Putting Youth on the Map, reflects several interests articulated by young people and their adult allies with whom we collaborated. First was a need for a holistic measure of youth wellbeing—one that reflects the intersecting ways that young people experience education, health, social relationships, etc.—that provided information at a local level and could be viewed by ethnicity and gender.

We created a Youth Well-Being Index that looked at how Californians between the ages of 10-18 fare in their communities. The index is a bit like a GPA on a school report card, combining multiple measures into an overall score out of a potential optimal 100 percent. It includes information on education outcomes, both the percentage of youth that graduate from high school, and the percentage that graduate having passed state university prerequisites. Youth health is based on scores from 9th grade tests of whether students meet minimum levels of physical fitness associated with protection against disease, and 9th and 11th grade surveys on substance use. A statewide survey called the California Healthy Kids Survey provided information on whether 9th and 11th graders experience their neighborhoods and schools as safe, report having caring relationships with adults and peers, and indicate community involvement through clubs, sports, places of worship, and/or helping others. We selected these measures based on research suggesting not only their importance unto themselves, but their tendency to indicate other aspects of wellness.

What we discovered when we looked at the whole map of California was that no community was doing very well by its youth. If most young people were meeting these education, health, social, and community involvement benchmarks—benchmarks that parents tend to want and California needs for our children—we would expect to see scores close to 100 percent (dark blue on the map). But no place even achieved an overall score of 80 percent (the equivalent of a B- on a report card). However, some places and populations, including many in the Central Valley, fare especially poorly.

 
Of course, youth do not grow up in a vacuum, but are influenced by their family’s access to opportunity. So we also created a Regional Opportunity Index. The Regional Opportunity Index development process, led by faculty member Chris Benner, included input from a national peer review committee of leading authorities with expertise in community development and opportunity mapping. It combines measures across the areas of economics, education, health, housing, transit, and civic engagement, drawing from multiple datasets. The index distinguishes between the resources held by individuals (the “People Index”) and available in places (the “Place Index”). For example, to assess economic opportunity, the People Index includes the percentage of people who have jobs and the percentage of people with an income over 200 percent of the federal poverty level; the Place Index includes information about job availability, job quality, job growth, and access to capital.

 
Locations depicted in green are those where individuals (on the People Index) and communities (on the Place Index) have the comparatively greatest levels of resources measured, while those in red have the least. These maps together begin to distinguish between two types of places that reflect opportunities for development. First, there are places where resources are available (green) but individuals don’t appear to benefit from them (orange/red). Secondly, there are places where resources are not available (orange/red) and people are faring poorly (orange/red). Many Central Valley communities have the latter pattern of orange/red for both People and Place.

We wanted users—youth and their supporters—to be able to interact with these data and analyses visually, so we developed point-and-click websites that share them using maps. The maps can be customized, printed, and posted to social media.

We collaborated with several California youth-focused groups to develop and pilot a curriculum and training. They focus not only on the nuts and bolts of data and maps, but why young people should care about maps at all, and how they can use them in combination with their own research and action.

The maps are tools that have helped some youth come to see themselves as activists and advocates for change. For example, we spoke with youth leaders about their neighborhood at Fathers and Families of San Joaquin, an organization dedicated to promoting the cultural, spiritual, economic, and social renewal of the most vulnerable families in Stockton and the greater San Joaquin Valley. Then they compared their personal stories to the story they found in the maps. The youth, who were all from south Stockton, looked at the index maps and said that the depressing data implicated them. One said “if the data says that we are not doing good then it must be all our fault.”

But when we showed them older maps, they saw instantly how powerful maps could be. The 1938 Stockton redlining maps used by banks for decades to deny loans to homeowners in certain parts of the city showed that the neighborhoods where the young people live today were for decades deemed “undesirable” by loan assessors. For the youth this shock turned to anger as they realized that redlined neighborhoods were those that are currently the most poverty-stricken, high crime areas. “So you mean to say that our community isn’t just the way it is, but it was built this way?” one youth asked.

 
The maps can also help young people figure out what their community needs. For example, through collaboration with diversity advocates New America Media, young people used maps to support their own investigative research. Youth working for Coachella Unincorporated, a publication in the eastern Coachella Valley, drew upon both their own experiences and maps to highlight the long distances between where people live and major transit stops and to encourage investment in additional transit stops as well as sidewalks and walking paths to access them.

In Sacramento, youth used maps to bring community challenges to life in planning for a major gathering, the Sacramento My Brother’s Keeper Summit in 2015. Ten young people were brought together to help create the summit program. After reviewing maps of their city, the youth focused on three key areas: safety, education, and employment. They then developed and recorded skits focused on their lived experience of the analyses.

One skit complemented data on the percentage of youth who are neither in school nor working, and spoke to the need for youth to feel like they are contributing by way of employment. The skit starts with a young man talking to himself about wanting to stop hustling and get a real job. He relives his experience of selling drugs as a way to make money and the impacts that has on him and his community. The video then moves to the young man walking in to local businesses and asking if they are hiring, only to be refused because of his age and then ridiculed about how he is dressed. The video ends up with the grim reality many youth face when they are not in school or working; they end up getting looped back into the juvenile justice system. The maps and skits together communicated youth experiences and needs to the intergenerational audience of youth participants and adult allies in a powerful way.

Even the best quantitative data maps can only tell a very partial story about young people’s lives. However, integrating these analyses with youths’ real-life experiences helps to start the intergenerational discussion, planning, investment, and action we need to strengthen Central Valley communities and redraw these maps.

The post Putting Kids on the Map appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“The fork on which we encamped appeared to have followed an easterly direction up to this place; but here it makes a very sudden bend to the north, passing between two ranges of precipitous hills, called, as I was informed, Goshen’s hole. There is somewhere in or near this locality a place so called, but I am not certain that it was the place of our encampment.”

It wasn’t just Fremont and it wasn’t just directions. An acute inspecificity about place was simply part of life in the early West. Even sketchier than Fremont’s directions was the way in which Mexico defined who owned what property. Lacking careful maps, Mexico defined property boundaries by features in the landscape. For example, the edge of one large and particularly valuable Mexican land grant was defined as being a hill with an oak tree on it. In California, which was part of Mexico from 1821 to 1848, that could be pretty much every hill. (Once that definition made its way into the American court system in the 1850s, it resulted in a court case that filled 3,500 pages and that U.S. Attorney General Jeremiah Black called “the heaviest case ever heard before a judicial tribunal.”)

Among the first tasks of American administration in California was solving the complicated maze of property disputes created by Mexican inspecificity. Defining place with meaning would require several more decades, American geographers, artists, and their technology. This is a story of how it happened, and how it led to some of the most ambitious science and greatest art of 19th-century America.

In the decades after Fremont’s explorations, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey proposed to survey all of America. The USCGS man in San Francisco was George Davidson, whose job it would be to survey the West. The USCGS’ plan was to virtually overlay the land with a geodetic grid, lines of longitude and latitude, that would allow anyone to know where they were in and on the landscape, where their property began and ended. In the West, this meant that the USCGS would have to measure the earth, from the gold-and-timber-rich mountains to California’s flat Central Valley, which everyone realized was the nation’s next agricultural heartland, to cities such as San Francisco and Sacramento.

Instead of Fremont’s “somewhere in or near” estimations of place, the USCGS intended to map the land to a specificity of one part in 5,500,000 to an error of less than one inch in 90 miles. It was this accuracy, achieved within two generations of Fremont’s descriptive guesswork, that led to surveyors coining the slyly ironic phrase ‘good enough for government work.’ This is the work from which we get today’s global positioning system.

Nowhere was more difficult to geodetically survey than vast, mountainous, and climatically challenging California, a state where atmospheric conditions could be wildly different across relatively minor distances and a place thoroughly interrupted by mountains that blocked views of still more mountains. This was a particular problem because it was imperative to be able to see high points across long distances, 100 miles and more, to do geodesy. In other words, the greatest obstacle to mapping Western land in a way that enabled it to have definable economic and political value was the Western landscape itself.

Davidson’s solution was so brilliant that 140 years later, his measurements, enabled by fieldwork conducted between 1879 and 1881, came within 10 millimeters (about a third of an inch) of measurements made with today’s digital instrumentation. Davidson’s work is considered one of the greatest feats of the 19th century geography.

Mt. Lola Looking Toward Lake Tahoe, 1879.

Here’s how he did it: First, Davidson proposed to superimpose an enormous virtual quadrilateral across the middle of California, with each of the four corners of the quadrilateral being tall peaks from which the other three summits were visible. Then, using precise surveying equipment, Davidson’s teams would take line-of-sight measurements over nearly 200 miles, distances more vast than any human had measured before.

First Davidson selected the western-most mountains: Mount Diablo, a 3,849-foot peak east of San Francisco Bay, and Mount St. Helena, a 4,342-foot pile of uplifted volcanic rock at the intersection of modern-day Napa, Sonoma, and Lake counties. Then Davidson and his team studied the landscape to pick the two Sierra peaks that would form the eastern-most quadrilateral tent-poles. They found two mountains that could be seen from both Diablo and St. Helena: Round Top, a 10,381-foot, unusually isolated mountain southwest of Lake Tahoe, and Mount Lola, a 9,148-foot bulbous mountain that is the highest point in the Sierras north of Donner Pass.

The two Sierra peaks selected, Davidson prepared to scale each one, to establish camps there and to take weeks’ worth of measurements. He packed three tons of equipment, loaded it onto railroad cars, made arrangements to rent mules, and hired an artist and photographer, Carleton Watkins.

By 1879, Watkins was the most famous artist living in the West. Over the previous 20 years, his pictures had motivated the Lincoln Administration to set aside the Yosemite Valley as a preserve, essentially creating the world’s first national park. Other Watkins pictures had given America its first, best views of its new Western lands. They guided business decisions, spurred investment and migration, and informed science, other artists’ work, and more.

Davidson’s request to Watkins was both simple and complicated: Take pictures from Lola looking across the Central Valley toward St. Helena and Diablo, and south toward Round Top. Then Watkins was to travel to Round Top and do the same thing.

Davidson seems to have wanted these pictures to help him build upon his quadrilateral. Having made measurements from each of the tent-poles, Davidson’s next survey step would be to break his quadrilateral into a series of triangles, triangles that would be formed by highly specific measurements that would allow the Davidson to lay down the most accurate geodetic grid imaginable. The intention of Watkins’s pictures, it seems, was to help the USCGS decide from what other mountain peaks to send crews and from which to take these triangulating measurements.

Watkins did as he was asked. Over several months in the late summer of 1879, Watkins hauled around 1,000 pounds of photographic gear—about four dozen or more mammoth-sized glass plates weighing around seven pounds each, a mammoth-plate camera that was nearly the size of a marriage chest, a stereographic camera, several sturdy tripods, many, many casks of chemicals so that he could prepare the glass plates to receive images and then fix those images on them, a dark-tent in which he would do all this work, and so on—from the Central Pacific’s Summit Station to Lola and Round Top, where he made 41 pictures.

Watkins typically traveled with one or two assistants, but at both Lola and Round Top he would have eagerly accepted assistance from mules and Davidson’s staff. At Round Top especially, the men would have had to hand-carry every bit of Watkins’s gear up the last 800 or so vertical feet to the summit along a sandy, slippery, steep trail. The last hundred feet would have required carrying material for a while, then putting it down in order to ascend via some hand-over-foot rock climbing, reaching down to pick the gear back up again, and looking for the next place to gain a couple feet toward the summit. Then, when it came time to make pictures, Watkins had to find a way to do so despite a ferocious, steady wind that seems to always blow across Round Top’s exposed summit. “Many difficulties were overcome in securing photographic views,” Davidson dryly wrote in his USCGS report.

Watkins’s pictures seem to have been exactly what Davidson needed. They showed the views between the four tent-poles of the quadrilateral with striking clarity. They were pictures that only Watkins, the most skilled landscape photographer in America, could have made. His previous experience working in challenging outdoor conditions, including as a member of the 1870 team that found a glacier on Mt. Shasta—the first discovered in North America at an altitude 4,000 feet higher than Round Top—meant that in a certain way this assignment was not the most difficult of his career.

As useful as Watkins’s pictures seem to have been to Davidson, today they stand on their own as the greatest pictures taken from mountaintops in the 19th century. In the several pictures looking out over the neighboring mountain ridges, Watkins manages to build compositions that make it look like saw-toothed ridges are there to pull the eye deeper into the picture, and to encourage the viewer to look deeper into the Sierra. One of them even features a man standing on a distant ridge. That single figure provides both scale and a sense of danger, a revelation of both the vastness of the landscape and the derring-do that working in it often required.

Davidson’s mapping of the West was an awesome achievement. Watkins’s pictures both helped to enable it—and transcended it.

The post The Epic Effort to Map the West appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To better understand the Osher Library’s work, I spoke to Ian Fowler, the facility’s director. Fowler told me about the advanced imaging technology that the library uses, including a 60-megapixel camera used to capture especially large maps, and a new 3D camera that allows the library to render globes. “The hardest part,” Fowler told me, “is getting a 100 percent accurate digital representation of the coloring. That involves recalibrating our camera for each shot.” Accordingly, properly digitizing a single map can take half a day or more. So far, it has scanned somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of its flat maps and 10 percent of the atlases in its collection.

Creatio Universe, 1720.

This isn’t a purely technical endeavor—old-fashioned research still plays an important part. Once an item from the library has been scanned, catalogers carefully examine it, working to add as much metadata as possible, from basic facts about provenance and size to subtler details about notes scribbled in the margins or advertising materials on the reverse. Thanks to this work, the library has sometimes uncovered details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, as when a cataloger working on an atlas recently discovered unusual notations such as poems that a past owner of the volume had added.

Digitization also presents scholars with a new way of looking at maps, since, according to Fowler, “you can get a lot more detail than you could even looking through a magnifying glass.” As Matthew Edney, Osher professor in the history of cartography, points out, you can also dwell on an image longer than you could while studying a physical item under controlled conditions. “Rare book rooms kick you out,” he told me, but you can take your time with digital copies.

In some cases, that’s allowed Edney to discover new features of maps that he thought he already knew well. He points in particular to an 18th-century map of New England that was once owned by Hugh Percy, a British army officer who was a key player during the battles of Lexington and Concord. “Staring at it on screen, you realize there are these faint pencil lines, possibly indicating tentative knowledge,” Edney said. As he explains in a recent paper on the topic, such observations helped him better understand how Percy likely used the map—offering a picture of what the map meant at the time, and not just what it shows.

A map of the most inhabited part of New England, 1755–1768.

It’s this quality of digital maps—their ability to help us recognize the practical dimensions of cartographic texts—that may be most important for historians, since a map does much more than provide us with a sense of place. “People always assume that a map is defined by the part of the world it shows,” Edney told me. “It’s actually clear that cultural conventions, social conventions, define the nature of the map far more.” Looking at different maps from a single era can reveal competing ways of acting on and making sense of the world, much as comparing the cartography of different eras can help reveal how those ideologies and attitudes change. Digitization can make it easier to think through such issues, in part because it allows you to set archival items—which may be housed in different libraries located far apart—beside one another.

Paradoxically, however, digitization may also make it more difficult to parse the larger context of a map—or any archival object. “As soon as you turn a primary source into an image, you start to lose something,” Edney suggests. Citing the rare books scholar Michael Suarez, he points out that the first thing to go is the larger bibliographic context that comes with an object: All of those details about where it was printed and who owned it that typically accompany an entry in an archival database. Though such information ultimately accompanies a digital record, it’s easier to neglect it, thanks to the relative simplicity of access. Second (and more difficult to reconstitute on a computer screen) are the physical details of an object—its size, its smell, the grain of the paper. These are the features that can help us situate an object within its vanished lifeworld, showing us what it meant to those who made it, along with the ways it helped them make meaning from the world more generally.

Map of Seville in Spain, 1750–1760.

The Osher library strives to frame its virtual copies of maps as fully as possible. Sometimes that means photographing beyond the edges of the image, revealing how the paper crumbles its edges or the binding of the book in which it appears. But there’s only so much they can do—especially when it comes to scale. “Online, everything looks the same size. That’s one of the things that shocks people sometimes when they come in,” Fowler told me. Though the library indicates how large an item is, researchers are still sometimes shocked when they request an item only to find that “you have to put eight tables together to unroll it.”

When all that context drops out, you’re left with the mere content of the map, which can make it harder to understand in truly historical terms. Jonathan Senchyne, director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (and a graduate school colleague of mine), says that this can sand down the historical texture of an object. “There’s always a temptation to think about something that’s been [digitized] in presentist terms,” Senchyne told me. In other words, it’s challenging to break free from our own ways of understanding and moving through space when we only access the past through a digital lens.

Map of the state of Maine. By Moses Greenleaf Esq. 1820.

There’s still a great deal to be found in such images, especially for those who appreciate the aesthetics of cartographic form. Look through some of the featured items on the Osher Library’s website, and you’ll come across an 1820 map of Maine, richly colored by hand; a gorgeously detailed Dutch map of the world from a century before on which shipping routes radiate out of islands like mercantile stars; a hand drawn diagram of a German river’s course; and much more. Without additional information, however, some of the other items in the collection—its 1750 manuscript land survey autographed by George Washington, for example, on which that formidable signature could easily vanish into its relatively humble surroundings—might lose some of what makes them special.

“When digitization started, a lot of people thought that would replace looking at the maps in person,” Fowler said. Today however, he and other cartographic librarians advocate studying them beside the physical ones when we can, drawing on the mutual advantages of print and digital. Those who don’t have the luxury to make their way to Portland, Maine, can still learn a great deal from the library’s collections, however, so long as they think carefully about how to approach them.

The post What Disappears When Ancient Documents Get Digitized? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Fortunately, I had an alternative. I was able to buy produce in the neighborhood from a truck that stopped by once or twice a week and sold papayas, mangos, melons, cucumbers, coconuts, corn, and whatever else was in season in Mexico (where I understood the produce to be coming from). It was a simple, flatbed truck. The driver picked up the produce right before driving around different neighborhoods and selling it until the truck was empty. The fruit and the vegetables were delicious and affordable, though I had no way of knowing how they were grown.

As a busy mother raising two young kids, this was a valuable resource for me. And I found myself wondering if there were other outlets like this in the area and if there was any way to become aware of them.

The dominant narrative around food in South L.A. is that there are few healthy options here and too much junk food. But I learned from experience that the narrative failed to include local responses to the issue, including the weekly produce truck. And because of this major omission, the potential solutions being offered to South L.A.’s food challenges dwell far too much on people or institutions coming in from outside the region.

Through my local volunteer work, I eventually become involved with Community Services Unlimited (CSU), a South L.A.-based nonprofit that creates community programs and supports organizing efforts in many areas, including building access to good food. In 2012, CSU partnered with TRUST South L.A. and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC to create a biking and walking map of healthy food outlets in South L.A.

I became part of the mapping project, first by brainstorming with my colleagues about how best to utilize the skills in the neighborhood to create this map. I was also one of the team members that led the first community walk using the map. As a tour guide, I pointed out both the community-driven spaces where good food is available and the many deficiencies that still exist—including the disparities inherent in the development of food outlets around USC and the lack of food outlets in the neighborhoods surrounding it.

This was an important project for many reasons. We wanted to document that there are in fact places in the neighborhood where healthy fare is available, and to share that information as widely as possible. We wanted to encourage biking and walking, initially by organizing bike rides and walks that used our map. And we were eager to engage local residents in thinking about mapping as a tool to create change.

A map for healthy food options in South L.A.

CSU had a longstanding program at a local elementary school, Growing Healthy, that worked with students to create and manage on-site growing areas and build students’ knowledge of food systems and how to change them. So students from the Growing Healthy program at Normandie Avenue Elementary School helped make the map. The students received hands-on training in mapping and its multiple potential uses. As local residents who regularly moved around in the neighborhood, they knew the local streets and made important contributions to the first drafts of the maps, which were then shared with the wider community for input.

Our most important goal in producing and distributing these maps was to show that solutions to the food access issue were emerging from the community. This meant striking a balance. While being careful to note that the problem of food access remains and more work must be done, we also pointed out that South L.A. residents themselves are not passively sitting by and waiting for the answers. That’s why the map includes places like Mama’s Chicken, a corner store near Slauson and Fourth Avenue whose owner makes it a point of pride to sell produce and other healthy foods.

The map has been a useful tool in ongoing food access work in the community, but the frustration of getting policymakers, academics, and media commentators to understand and acknowledge community-driven solutions remains. Outsiders still largely focus on potential solutions that come from outside the community, despite the progress of CSU and other like-minded local organizations.

That focus on outside saviors has real costs. For example, even with all the promises made to South L.A. since 1992 about food, the area has seen a net decrease in produce markets, as one Occidental College study demonstrated. Elected officials have wasted decades trying to convince wealthy supermarket chains like Ralphs or Trader Joe’s to open markets, often by dangling public monetary incentives. The most recent fiasco involved our city giving two acres of land and $750,000 to a private developer to create a South L.A. market—and that developer walking away when asked to build the store so it would not look like a concrete block.

Public incentives to support small-scale local initiatives have a proven impact. Just one example is Mandela Foods Co-op, a worker-owned co-op serving West Oakland, a community very similar to South L.A., which is about to celebrate its seventh anniversary. We already have similar initiatives in place in South L.A. CSU began building our local food social enterprise, the Village Market Place, in 2007 (it has also started a side project to use excess food at South L.A. urban farms). In that first year, we served 15 local families with fresh food. By the end of last year, we were serving 9,000 local families annually.

The growth of this business is only limited by our capacity. In July 2015, CSU purchased a 10,000-square-foot lot at Vermont Avenue and 66th Street that we are developing into South L.A.’s first organic market and café, along with an onsite farm. Why are the public dollars not offered to projects like these with the same ease that money is thrown at private investors?

The map is now three years old, and it’s still growing and inspiring people. At CSU, we use it to share news of our existing local healthy food outlets, and to encourage physical activity through walks and bike rides. The map and other community-generated mapping projects make good starting points for teaching young people about community-driven research and how it can help make meaningful change. The youth in our From the Ground Up program have organized their own community bike ride and are working on an extension of the healthy map that will cover neighborhoods as far south as Manchester, with Vermont Avenue as a central corridor.

Along with partners, we are beginning to think about ways to leverage our market development projects to impact broader development along the Vermont corridor (and, vice versa, how this development can help the market). Meanwhile, we remain committed to mapping the small but crucial community outlets like my old favorite food truck.

The post There’s More Healthy Food in South L.A. Than You Think appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Psychologists call it confirmation bias, and when my normally level-headed brother-in-law got caught in its trap a few years ago, the consequences could have been deadly.

In August 2010, I was backpacking with my brothers-in-law Ken and Robert, my son James, and Ken’s son Tim in the Wenaha Wilderness in southeastern Washington state. Summer in this area, a high plateau riven by a maze of valleys, is hot and dry. We stuck to upper elevations to avoid the heat of the valleys, but even on the ridge tops, temperatures reached the upper 90s, and there were few trees for shade. Water could only be found at a limited number of springs, scattered at intervals of five to eight miles along the trail.

One afternoon, we set out after lunch on a five-mile hike to McCain Spring, where we would camp for the night. The guidebook noted that the side trail that would take us to the campsite and spring was easy to miss, and the next decent water source was another four miles beyond that. With packs weighing 50 pounds each, we made our way under the hot afternoon sun through a long downhill stretch of dry scrub and yellowed grass.

I am an obsessive map-reader, and I worried that we would somehow miss the obscure turnoff to the spring, wondering how we’d find it in the jigsaw puzzle of valleys projecting out to the east.

Each time we stopped near a lone tree, I would dart into the shade, pulling out my map and compass. I tried to triangulate against the distant peaks to see how far we’d come. I got the impression that my brother-in-law Ken was growing increasingly annoyed by my time-consuming attention to the map. In an irritated tone of voice, Ken asked me to get up and get back on the move.

On the map a landmark named Danger Point matched a rock formation with a steep drop-off. I pointed this out to Ken. He dismissed my identification. He was certain that we hadn’t traveled that far, that we could not possibly be about three-quarters of the way to McCain Spring. It had only been two hours since our lunch break. I was not completely sure who was right. I just let the two possibilities hang side-by-side in my mind. Searching for more clues, I spied a small saddle and a copse of trees in the distance that seemed to match the topography of the spring on the map. Again I pointed this out to Ken. Again he dismissed my claim.

Ken and I were approaching the question “Where am I?” in different ways. Ken based his estimate of our location solely on the elapsed time we’d been hiking since lunch. While I was thinking about the distance we’d covered, I also was comparing features on the ground to the map, continually updating my sense of position. Normally we hike at about one mile per hour with full packs, but since we were walking mostly downhill, we were moving substantially faster, throwing off Ken’s sense of location. Nonetheless, Ken’s sense of certainty and my view of his competence sowed doubts in my mind. When we reached the grove of trees I’d seen in the distance, there appeared to be a valley that led to the south. This seemed consistent with the map’s depiction of the flowage from the spring.

A trail led off downhill in the direction of the valley. I suggested that this was the spur trail to the spring. Ken was convinced that we were nowhere close. I pleaded with him. I suggested we drop our packs and reconnoiter. Why not let my son James walk for 10 minutes down the spur and his son Tim walk 10 minutes down the main trail? They would scout, return, and report back to us. Ken reluctantly agreed. He, Robert, and I waited at the junction.

As soon as James and Tim were out of sight, Ken became agitated and impatient. He shouldered his pack and walked off briskly in Tim’s direction. I couldn’t stop him. Minutes later, we heard a voice echoing from the bottom of the glade, “Hey, Dad, I found the spring.” When James returned, he asked anxiously, “Where’s Uncle Ken?” I told him what had happened. We waited 10 more minutes, but it was increasingly obvious Ken wasn’t coming back. He didn’t have enough water to reliably make it to the next water source.

James decided to give chase. Dropping his pack, he started jogging in the general direction of Ken and Tim. Robert and I took the spur down to the spring.

It was a wonderful campsite, used mainly by hunters in the fall but empty now, in late summer. Robert and I set up our tents and waited.

It was quite some time before James showed up with Ken and Tim in tow. Ken dropped his pack, looked around, and said this couldn’t possibly be the spring. He still was stuck on the idea that we could not have traveled this far, despite all the evidence in plain sight. I suggested it was at least a suitable place to spend the night. He relented.

Now it might be easy to fault Ken, but I think something else was going on. Certainly his reliance on a single navigational tool—elapsed time—was a contributing factor. The heat was a more insidious problem. Although none of us had a clear case of heat exhaustion, I think the afternoon sun bearing down on us steered our judgments, locking us into our own little prisons of thought.

The next evening a ranger on her evening stroll confirmed that the site was indeed McCain Spring.

I had already been convinced; Ken had not. After deciding we were in a different spot, he had focused only on the puzzle pieces that fit his preconceptions, ignoring other important clues. It’s the kind of confirmation bias we see all the time—and that we should be more vigilant about.

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