Tag Archives: spatial visualization

Highlights from the 2019 Digital Scholarship Open House

On May 1, 2019 the Digital Scholarship Group hosted an Open House that featured the work of several faculty, graduate students, and librarians. Here is a brief overview of the presentations with links to slides and other materials shared kindly by the presenters.

Richard L. Sweeney (Assistant Professor, Economics Department) who participated in this past year’s GIS Faculty Cohort presented on his applications of spatial visualization and GIS for investigating the fracking boom.

Title page from The court & kitchin of Elizabeth, commonly called Joan Cromwel (1664)

Sharon Lacey (independent scholar) and Margaret Summerfield (PhD student, English Department) who participated in this past year’s Digital Scholarship Incubator each presented on their research projects. Lacey created a video discussing her research into how painting techniques in Europe developed across time in relation to other sociocultural factors. Summerfield presented on a collaborative transcription and annotation project (under development) with several faculty, students, and librarians, A Digital Scholarly Edition of The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwel (1664).

There were several presentations focused on collaborative projects or pedagogical support with librarians and faculty. Seth Meehan (Associate Director, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies), Anna Kijas (Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian) & Sarah DeLorme (Associate Digital Scholarship Librarian) presented on one of these projects, the Jesuit Online Bibliography, a recently launched bibliography database of scholarship in Jesuit Studies.

Stephen Sturgeon (Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian & Bibliographer for English) discussed the collaborative efforts that went into migrating and re-imagining metadata and records for the Becker Collection: Drawings of the American Civil War Era. Carling Hay (Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences) shared pedagogical approaches and tips for incorporating podcasting into her weather and climate class (EESC1172).

Header image: Joseph Becker, Railroad Pass with Chinese Workers, 1869-1870. Becker Archive, Boston College Fine Arts Dept.

Visualizing racial disparity in Boston, c. 1970

During the spring and summer of this year, I collaborated on an exhibit, Desegregating Boston Schools: Crisis and Community Activism, 1963-1977, with Sarah Melton and Dr. Eric Weiskott. The main exhibit is at the John J. Burns Library, and a smaller complementary exhibit is on view in the Reading Room, Level 3, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Library. Curating this exhibit required doing research in special collections at John J. Burns Library, specifically in the Louise Bonar and Carol Wolfe collection, Citywide Coordinating Council Records, and the Robert F. Drinan, SJ Congressional Papers.

One aspect of this exhibit was to create visualizations and infographics using racial demographic data for the City of Boston, racial distribution of students within the Boston Public Schools, and outcomes of the Boston School Committee election of 1973. The data for these visualizations was drawn from the materials in the Bonar/Wolfe collection, Citywide Coordinating Council Records, 1970 Census, and Analyze Boston.

To complement the materials in the exhibit in the John J. Burns Library, which include a map depicting the total black population in the City of Boston (1970) juxtaposed with the wards won by the only black candidate—Patricia Bonner-Lyons, who ran for the Boston School Committee in 1973—I created these three density maps. The maps were created with tract-level 1970 Census data, which depicts the neighborhoods within the City of Boston as established by the Bureau of the Census. The shading (light to dark) of each neighborhood correlates with the number (low to high) of people according to race, as documented in the 1970 Census. From these visualizations it is easy to see that neighborhoods, including South Boston, West Roxbury, Roslindale, and Jamaica Plain were predominantly white, while the neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester were predominantly black.

Density map of population by racial demographics in City of Boston, ca. 1970.

Density map depicting population according to racial demographics (white, black, and hispanic) in the City of Boston, ca. 1970. (Click on the image to open the interactive map in separate tab)

There are many different GIS platforms and tools available, but for this project I used Tableau Public a freely available software that enables you to create interactive data visualizations (not just maps!). The neighborhoods in these maps are created with a shapefile that I generated from the Neighborhood Change Database 1970-2010. Tableau Public provides the option to connect a spatial file, which will then allow you to render a spatial visualization and identify the specific dimensions (for this map: population by race) that will be shown in an info box upon clicking or hovering over the map.

Dimensions are visible in the pop-up box.

The full workbook for this visualization can be downloaded from the “City of Boston 1970 (test)” page on my Tableau Public profile page.

ARL Digital Scholarship Institute: Part 2

It’s hard to believe that two months have passed since the inaugural Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) Digital Scholarship Institute hosted at Boston College. In the previous post, you can read Sarah Melton’s overview of the goals of the Institute, and takeaways from the keynote by Jennifer Vinopal, Associate Director for Information Technology at The Ohio State University Libraries, and an opening workshop with Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries. The ARL Digital Scholarship Institute was developed by a group of individuals from five institutions brought together by ARL in October 2016 to support one of the primary goals of the ARL Academy to “foster the development of an agile, diverse and highly-motivated workforce as well as the inspiring leadership necessary to meet present and future challenges.”

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