5 Maps for the Visually Inclined
I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at, reading about, and – lately – making maps. No, this obsession with maps is not a new thing for me: I was totally the kid who pored over the AAA map on family vacations, the college student who lugged that same dog-eared AAA map on numerous cross-country treks, and the trucking dispatcher who tacked xeroxed, highlighted maps of Iowa and Michigan and Wisconsin over my desk. When Google Maps finally unveiled their Bike Routes feature – well hey, there was at least one GPS-less bike hipster in Austin who took a victory lap around the neighborhood to celebrate.One of the many things I love about maps is their ability to tell a story in a way that is somehow both totally objective and entirely personal. Certain elements of a landscape – the length of a road, maybe, or the location of a county line – are relatively fixed, but other elements – whether a road is safe to bike on, where the best barbecue is located, where the boundaries of a neighborhood are, how best to get from North Austin to the East side – are products of individual perspectives and ways of filtering and evaluating data. A really good map is one that visualizes the relationship between the objective and the personal in interesting ways; an awesome one makes a good argument or raises some good questions and has fun doing it. Here are five of my faves.1. John Snow's 1854 Cholera map
As Pete Warden points out, Snow’s map is the poster child for effective visualization of information, mostly because Tufte wrote so convincingly about it in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Snow, who had been trying to convince NYC officials for some time that cholera was not just water-born but related to a particular pump, created this map to show the correlation between high numbers of cholera-related deaths and proximity to a contaminated well in SoHo. The details of the story might be the stuff of legend, but I still love this map: it is simple, clear, direct, and uses spatial information to make a compelling argument for the cause of a deadly disease.2. Eric Fischer’s racial integration maps (click through for more images)
Janet Davis sent Eric Fischer’s maps my way and I’m so glad she did. These maps aren’t interactive nor are they even particularly flashy, but the way that they present data on race from Census 2000 – one dot for every 25 people of a particular racial or ethnic background – reveals incredible variation in how integrated (or not) major US cities are and just begs for further cultural analysis. The map of Austin is telling, but my fellow east coasters might want to check out New York and DC, too. The data from Census 2010 is just starting to come out – it’ll be interesting to see if any of the racial landscapes represented here have changed.3. The CDC obesity epidemic map (click through for more images)
An oldie but a goodie, this map traces the changing rates of obesity in all 50 states from 1985 to 2010. Yes, we’ve all heard that obesity rates are increasing, but the regional differences represented here hint at so many different stories: different food cultures, exercise cultures, infrastructure, economics, climate, standards of beauty. The time-lapse bit is pretty awesome, too.4. Where Americans are moving (click through for interactive Flash map)This map might have its issues – for one thing, data constraints mean it has to track moves by county rather than by city or state – but it’s still a lot of fun to play with and a great way to display population flows in different parts of the country. A friend in Detroit sent this to me, and comparing Detroit’s flows with Austin’s is certainly food for thought – as is the whole interactive mapping concept.5. The Walmart Virus[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojLQ2t6N1EU]So many awesome references. So little time. The great thing about this video is the change in tone from the original graphic on FlowingData: with the voiceover, what FlowingData describes as a “wildfire” or as “organic growth” becomes something menacing and destructive. One map, many perspectives, incredibly fascinating visual.
5 Questions with Department Chair Steven Hoelscher
One of the goals of AMS :: ATX is to connect you with all of the exciting things happening around the Department of American Studies. One way we hope to do this is by introducing you to some of the inspiring and accomplished people we are proud to call mentors and fellow scholars. In our "5 Questions" posts, we want to take a little time to talk with our faculty members about the many places they are coming from and why they do what they do.Last week I sat down for our very first "5 Questions" talk with Dr. Steven Hoelscher, Chair of the Department of American Studies and Academic Curator for Photography at the Harry Ransom Center.What is your academic background? How does this inform your work today?My background, unlike a lot of people in this department, is in a traditional academic field, human geography and environmental geography. My undergrad majors were Geography and Environmental Science, and my MA and PhD were also in Geography. So, in that regard, I’m coming to American Studies after my formal education has been completed. I don’t see that as necessarily a hindrance to me as an American Studies scholar, but it makes me somewhat unusual. It also makes me unusual in the Geography world that I’m as committed to interdisciplinarity as I am to anything “geographical.” But it certainly informed my American Studies scholarship. Issues of landscape, space and place, are part of pretty much everything I do. So, for instance, I’m working on a book about the Magnum photography archive, and the chapter of my book, I believe, will be something called “Magnum’s Geographies Toward a Global Sense of Place.” That’s a very geographic concept with a rather nontraditional source material for geographers.What has been your favorite project to work on?I think in a lot of ways my favorite project was my first serious one, which was my dissertation that became my first book. What I liked about it was the challenge of learning how to do serious research, first of all, and being able to then successfully pull it off. That was a great learning experience for me.But more specifically, what I liked about it was the combination of the ethnographic component and the archival component. I had a ton of archives that I worked through of the typical fashion: newspapers and letters and business records, photographs, and all that sort of thing. But the ethnography was really wonderful, and I spent a lot of time talking to literally over a hundred people over the course of five years. I got to know them very well, and I enjoyed that, just getting to know these people.I lived close to my field site; it was an hour drive from where I lived, so it was easy to go down at a moment’s notice. I was writing about ethnic cultural performance, and the community I was writing about had performed a play in German written by Schiller since 1938. I was in the play for four concurrent years, and it was wonderful to go down for evening practices with the farmers and the people who worked at the local auto repair shop and the lawyers and the teachers and the busboys. We all were in this play together, and it was really fun to hear the different forms of German that people used, whether you were an immigrant from Germany, an immigrant from Switzerland, the third generation descendant of those immigrations, or someone like me who learned German in school and studied abroad. It was wonderful to learn the different ways that the language was put together.What would you say are the projects or people that have inspired your work?Well, again it depends on the sort of project. Right now I am working heavily in the area of photography, so I would say great photographers inspire me, in particular photographers who have been associated with Magnum, whether that’s Robert Capa or Inge Morath or Susan Meiselas or Sebastiao Salgado. What I admire about them is their commitment to showing and explaining the world as it is with a critical yet also humanist lens. There’s a deep sympathy and not mockery of the people and places they are photographing, and I deeply admire that.Another set that has inspired me are my advisors over the years, my mentors in graduate school, especially Yi Fu Tuan, who I studied with at Wisconsin. Among the many things that he has inspired me to do is try to be the best writer I can with the best language that I can to the broadest audience that I can. He taught me that scholars need to communicate in language that is understandable to people outside the academy. Although for him English was a second language, he might be the most poetic writer of English that I have ever read.Other people who’ve inspired me are good journalists and writers of the sort that you read in the New Yorker every week. I feel that so much of our work as American Studies scholars is to keep our fingers on the pulse of American culture, contemporary American Culture, even if we are writing about the past, and for me the best contemporary American writing is published in the New Yorker.I would finally add scholars who, in my view, are asking important questions, are methodologically rigorous, and communicate the findings of their research in evocative ways. There are a number of people I would put on that list, but right now I would say historian/geographers like William Cronon is somebody whose work really speaks to me in profound ways.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations, either in American Studies or at large in contemporary society?Of course, every time we work on any form of scholarship it’s always in dialogue with other scholars and issues that are current in society, even if it’s a historical project. So, it just depends on the particular project you’re asking about. If I look at my project on the Jim Crow South and tourism in Mississippi, it was very much in dialogue with people who have written about the Civil Rights movement, people who have written about cultural performance and racial ethnic identity, but also people who are concerned about contemporary issues of cultural memory and heritage. Whether you see the Confederate South as unbearably and obnoxiously racist or a part of your heritage depends on where you come from, and I was communicating with people who were writing about this and I could give examples of that for all my research. We always have to be connected, otherwise it’s pointless.What projects are you excited about working on in the future?The most immediate one is the Magnum project. In brief, the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center received the archive from the New York office of Magnum Photos, which constitutes 200,000 photographs. These are amazing photographs that have shaped our collective understanding of the second half of the 20th century. You may not recognize the name Robert Capa, but surely you’ve seen the photograph of the soldiers in the water on Normandy on D-Day; that’s Robert Capa. You might not know the name Dennis Stock, but surely you’ve seen the photograph of James Dean walking in the rain in Times Square. I could go on. You’ve maybe not heard the name Susan Meiselas, but you’ve seen her photographs of El Salvador and Nicaragua during the conflicts in the late 70s and early 80s. So these are massively important photographs and no scholarship outside Magnum has ever been done on them because Magnum has kept a very close clamp on the release of these photographs. The fact that the archive is here now and I can do this work is a great opportunity.But I would say a second research project that I’m working on is connected to my teaching in Vienna. I’m interested in questions of historical and cultural memory, and the title of this project, loosely, is “Monuments We’d Like to Forget.” I’m interested in the way in which memory and forgetfulness are a part of the Viennese landscape as they relate to the Nazi past. This is really interesting, because the official narrative of the Austrian Republic is that Austria was Hitler’s first victim, and this is a myth that is exploded by even the briefest glance at Austrian political history, where the state welcomed Hitler with open arms in 1938. It is an ambivalent past and this ambivalent past is still part of the landscape, and I hope that this becomes a book project within the next couple of years. I’ve written one paper, but I’d like it to be a book.Bonus question: If you had to describe American Studies in a sentence, what would you say?American Studies is the interdisciplinary study of American culture past and present from multiple and competing viewpoints over time.Dr. Hoelscher has been with the Department of American Studies at UT since 2000. His books include Picturing Indians (winner of the 2009 Wisconsin Historical Society Book Award of Merit), Heritage on Stage, and Textures of Place (co-edited with Karen Till and Paul Adams).
Faculty Research: Radical Children's Literature Now!
This past June, Dr. Julia Mickenberg delivered the Francelia Butler Lecture at the 2011 Children’s Literature Association Conference in Roanoke, Virginia with Dr. Philip Nel. Check out their address here (and standing ovation!).[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTaOM1rfcPI]More on children's literature coming soon...
12 Twitterers American Studies Folks Should Follow
I’ve become known as a Twitter evangelist around these parts, which is not an entirely inaccurate assessment. I’ve been a user for about three and a half years now, and continually find new, helpful uses for it, thanks largely to other Twitterers’ innovations in the ways that they use the site.One area that’s seen a lot of innovation has been in education. If you do a Google search for “twitter and academia” or “twitter and classroom,” you’ll find thousands of sites devoted to exploring how the academic world can engage with Twitter to enhance student learning, bridge gaps across disciplines, and otherwise enable communication and sharing in new ways.If you’re an internet or social media neophyte, though, the Twitterverse can seem more than a little daunting, even for the most illustrious and tech-savvy academic. With millions of users, jumping in at this point takes some mettle – or at least some guidance.So, dear reader, we’ve curated a list of users you might consider following, especially if you are lucky enough to study American Studies. Besides us, of course.Granted, this list is by no means any kind of comprehensive! There are hundreds of accounts that would probably be helpful to you and your scholarship, thanks to the big tent quality of the field, but our hope is that these will help you get your feet wet in the Twitterverse.Check it out below the fold!1. @chronicle2. @insidehighered3. @profhackerFirst things first: if you’re any kind of affiliated with the world of higher education, you must follow The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and ProfHacker. They’ll alert you to the latest developments in academic news, meditations on the scholarly life, and the place of technology in education.4. @errolmorrisErrol Morris is a fantastic documentary filmmaker, but he’s also an incredibly entertaining Twitterer. He offers both high brow academic tweets (like his discussion of Wittgenstein’s interest in composite photography) and wonderfully pithy one-liners:
5. @independentlensAlong those documentary lines, check out PBS’s Independent Lens account. They tweet info about documentaries in general as well as “tasty morsels” for your consumption – like clips. Perfect for a brief distraction from whatever work you've glanced at Twitter to escape.6. @richard_floridaFor anyone interested in creativity and/or urban life, this is a wonderful resource. Florida (author of The Creative Class and big, big fan of Austin) tweets commentary on topics from American self-centeredness to post-industrial landscapes.7. @tedtalksThe whole TED project is one of my favorite developments in new media and public knowledge. But much as I love how the entity has grown - you can find hundreds of videos on the website, ted.com - that same growth means it's hard to choose from all of the awesome. That's why this Twitter account is so handy: every day (or roughly thereabouts), they tweet a new video for your viewing pleasure. No sifting necessary!8. @cornelwestCornel West is one of our great public intellectuals, working on subjects from politics to race to jazz to rap. On Twitter, he opines about any number of topics, and, if you need more reason to follow him, he recently quoted American Studies patron saint Herman Melville in a tweet:
9. @smithsonianmagIf you ever wanted to know what happens when comics meet dinosaurs, you’d find out here. Of course, the Smithsonian Magazine doesn’t simply offer poppy content like that; you’ll also find links to articles about Hitchcock films, bluegrass music, and baseball, among other topics.10. @lifeIconic photographs live on Life.com. And, since there’s too much there to comb through, the Life Twitter account curates intriguing and relevant photos for our viewing pleasure. Oscars coming up? Get ready for a photographic retrospective of iconic Hollywood moments. Hurricane brewing? You’ll find links to photographs of natural disasters and responses. Timely and always fascinating.11. @magnumphotosIf you have even the slightest interest in photography, follow Magnum Photos. They usually tweet incredible single photographs, but every once in a while, they’ll send off an article or a collection from one of their esteemed members.12. @theatlanticYou already know The Atlantic’s content is great, so we’re just listing it to remind you that it’s there.Well, did we miss anyone? Who are your must-follows? Weigh in, comment!