MJ Website Review: The Northwestern California Genocide Project & Mapping Decline

Introduction

The Northwestern California Genocide Project (NCGP) is a Digital Archive to present the variety of information about the massacres of Native American during the 19^th century in Northwestern California.[1] Since the NCGP was constructed by Omeka, it will be a good example for us to diagnose the actual demonstration of the features by its tools and similarities with themes.

Mapping Decline is a project of Professor Colin Gordon.[1] His book Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.[2]

The Northwestern California Genocide Project (NCGP)

The Front Page

NCGP_Fig_1_Front

The front page of NCGP displays the category banner on top, its banner and search tab on top-mid, an explanatory note about the project on middle, and Featured Item-Exhibit, Recently Added Items at the bottom.

The position of the category banner is not intuitive though the search tab seems to be well fitted. The Featured Item and Exhibit sections disclose random circulation of contents from each category which provides good enough chances for users to have unexpected encounters.

Browse Items

NCGP_Fig_2_Browse_Items

The Browse Items is a page with simple pile of archival sources. The page has a sort function by title, creator, and date added despite it does not really provides convenience for researching the information.

Map

NCGP_Fig_3_Map

The second category is Map. The marked points on the map provide archival sources and information about the certain region. But there are three split sorts of the map lacking description about the causes for the division. It would have been better if the pages were intended to classify with themes, different timelines, or authors. Meaningless duplications of the pages merely caused distractions for the users to browse the items on the maps.

NCGP_Fig_3_Map_Items_1

You can access to the brief information about the area with description and multimedia sources by clicking the spot on the map.

Browse Exhibits

NCGP_Fig_4_Browse_Exhibits_1

Browse Exhibits is a page with lengthy bulletins. The postings are dealing with the explanation about the Massacres with the items of the website.

Tag

NCGP_Fig_5_Browse_Tag

One of the strong points in NCGP is the introduction of the tag. Dispersed items and pages could be organized with following the tag. However, some items and pages were not having any tags that could not fully utilize the function to provide convenience for the users.

Mapping Decline

MV_WhiteFlight

The first tap of the Mapping Decline is "White Flight." By graphic expression marking with colored dots, Gordon successfully describes the chronology of suburbanization in St. Louis leaded by white people.

The density and progress directly drive the users to acknowledge the information spontaneously.

However, mixed-use of increase and decreese makes map a little bit congested that it would have been better to apply selective choice of displaying certain catecorgy of information.

MV_RacenProperty

Race & Property tap dipicts the municipal policies and their effective areas. It is very instructive for users to identify the documented sources withe visual expressions. Moreover, Gordon attached the primary sources on map sothat the users can direclty access with.

Although, the icon of the documents is lacking visual distinctions or titles that makes it treacky to find out the information precisely.

MV_Zoning

Municipal Zoning tap shows the development of zoning in St. Louis and its Missouri suburbs.

This tap has more attention at the explantive box. With Intro, he introduces the general meaning and historical context of his works. And Info discloses the detailed explanations about zoning with chronological order.

But a weakness in this tap is the choice of colors. It is intuitive to use saturated colors, despite for some people with color weaknesses would not recognize the zoning area since they were colored with red, orange, and yellow.

MV_UrbanRenew

Urban Renewal tap is to explain the expected side effect of redevelopment, public housing policies of federal-regional authorities. Gordon applied interactive index box to provide more descriptive explanations about each policies and plans.

It would have been better if he linterlocked the documents and indexings. Also, fixed scale of the map is not appropriate for the last categorization since it covers the most vast arial range.

General Assessment[4]

Professor Gordon added an instruction box to provide his intention and interpretation of the mapping data more accurately. And he applied minor adjustable factors like “municipal boundaries” and “roads and highways” information on map to correlate the geographical variables with the historical changes and policies as well. The minor details like the scale of the map and coloring were the only flaws in his work. Although, it would have been better if he applied a function such as a coalition of all mapping classifications. Providing more interactive features would benefit and pull the researchers.

Conclusion

The topic of both websites I diagnosed is closely related to our collaborative project. Among the branches of Digital Humanities, NCGP was more likely to be a digital archive, meanwhile, Mapping Decline was a graphical realization of spatial history. The latter is much more compatible with our collaborative project since it dealt with historical analysis of political dynamics of urban redevelopment. Despite it is lacking humane touch, because Gordon did not examine the cultural-life histories of victims of urban redevelopments. As our project is also focusing on private sector of the urbanite history in Sur, archiving and disclosing of the oral history, memoir should be included as well. Thus, NCGP’s format would be our result at the end as it used the same tool (we are using newest version but still), despite we should apply more fixed and organized style or structure.

Citations

[1] The Northwestern California Genocide Project is a Digital Archive put together and presented by Humboldt State University students.This project is the first digital source to PRESENT to the public and future scholars a collection of items on genocidal atrocities and mass extermination events committed against Northwestern California native peoples perpetrated by white pioneers and settlers around the mid and late 19th century.

While this archive is representing just a fraction of the genocide committed against the native peoples of the Americas, it is critical to recognize and analyze these events that have taken place in Northern California during this time period, where an influx of white settlers was occurring into the state for gold and other resources to exploit and make profit. With them, they brought ideologies of divine right and title of the land, racial superiority, and extermination of native nations. Along with the ideologies of the settlers and the federal government, systematic legislation that was passed during this era limited interaction between whites and tribes, native peoples access to resources, forced relocation, legal buying and selling of native children, and more dehumanizing practices.

With the combination of racial superiority ideology and legislation passed by the federal government, this led to land and resource disputes between whites and native tribes. These altercations gave rise to hysteria, anxiety, and fear that native tribes would retaliate against the whites. In response to that fear, many militia and vigilante groups formed within Northwestern California counties. In some of the atrocities covered in these collections, these groups, along with volunteers, were the main perpetrators of the slaughtering of native men, women and children.

(Mersadies Lewis-Brown, Emma Holmes ,Nate Kenny, Michael Ruff, Dane Warner, “Northwestern California Genocide Project,” accessed February 15, 2022, https://nwgenocide.omeka.net.).

[2] “Colin Gordon,”accessed February 15, 2022, https://clas.uiowa.edu/history/people/colin-gordon.

[3] “Mapping Decline St. Louis and the Fate of the American City,” accessed February 15, 2022, https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14445.html.

[4] The maps were composed in ArcView 9.2, using a combination of digital census geography, archival maps, and historical and contemporary datasets. The base map for the home and the documents pages is Plate I from N.M Fenneman, Geology and Mineral Resources of the St. Louis Quadrangle (United States Geological Survey, Bulletin 438, 1911). The base map for the other map series is the ESRI shaded world relief layer, based on the USGS’s National Elevation Data (NED) data.

White Flight

The White Flight series uses 1940-2000 tract level census data. The 1990 and 2000 data and tracts boundaries were drawn from the Census, the 1970 and 1980 data and boundaries are based on the digitization done by Geolytics for those census years. 1960 and earlier data was adapted from the Donald and Elizabeth Mullen Bogue data maintained by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. 1960 and earlier tract maps were digitized (working backwards from 1970) by the author. The historical data and tract boundaries are now much more readily available thanks to the yeoman work of the University of Minnesota’s National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) project and Andrew Beveridge’s Social Explorer. To display the change over a decade, tract boundaries were normalized for the two census years. This usually meant restricting the scope of the map to the metro tracts of the earlier census, and collapsing data from the latter year into the census geography of the earlier year. In the 1950-1960 map, for example, this required adjusting the 1960 data ( 323 census tracts) to fit the 1950 geography (247 tracts).

Race and Property

The Race and Property series is based on a number of archival sources. The 1916 layer is based on the text of the ordinance, and on the description provided in “Blocks in Which Negros May Take up Residence,” St. Louis Post Dispatch (2 March 1916) from the clippings collection of the St. Louis Public Library. The scope of the 1923 and 1941 realtor’s zones are summarized in Charles Johnson and Herman Long, People v Property: Race Restrictive Covenants in Housing (Nashville, 1947), and are noted on the City Plan Commission’s 1930 map, “Distribution of the Negro Population,” a copy of which is in the Missouri Historical Society’s map collection. The NAACP’s 1945 estimate of the reach of restrictive deed covenants is adapted from Johnson and Long, People v. Property, 24, 60. The HOLC security maps were digitized from the 1937 and 1940 St. Louis maps in the City Survey Files of the Records of the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, RG 195.3, National Archives.

Municipal Zoning

The Municipal Zoning series is based on archival zoning maps from a wide variety of sources, including the planning and zoning departments of many St. Louis County municipalities. Many (and especially the earliest) zoning plan and maps can be found in the bound and unbound city planning reports conducted by the Harland Bartholomew company and archived in the Harland Bartholomew and Associates Papers at Washington University.

Urban Renewal

The Urban Renewal series is based on a wide array of archival maps, St. Louis City ordinances, programmatic reports, and the City’s current property database.

(“Mapping Decline,” accessed February 15, 2022, http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/about/)

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