“Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920”
3. Abstract
Understanding the history of the South Side of Chicago is important to a number of historical
fields, such as immigration/ethnicity, religion, labor, leisure, and public policy. “Mapping
Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” creates the first interactive exhibit that allows a wide
audience to connect the significance of the South Side’s geography and history in the pivotal
first twenty years of the twentieth century. This project will provide the audience with an
interactive map of the South Side populated with key locations related to the South Side’s
history. Clicking on a location will reveal an image and description of that location’s
significance. Each location will seamlessly link to a contextual narrative that explicates the
primary issues in one of several historical themes with which the location is associated. User
choice will dictate the way in which this project is used and explored. This project intended to
appeal to a broad audience across research fields.
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4. Project Narrative
Enhancing the Humanities
Through the use of digital tools, historians have been able to couple traditional historical
interpretative practices with products that would be difficult, expensive, or otherwise
impossible to produce in an analog space. In particular, geospatial tools allow historians to
illustrate locations of historical significance and their relationships with broader historical
narratives. With the added benefit of many geospatial tools’ emphasis on user interactivity,
historians are able to simultaneously recreate time and place as well as provide historical
context and interpretation. To this end, we seek Level II funding to develop an interactive map
of the South Side of Chicago between 1900 and 1920 that works in conjunction with thematic
contextual narratives.
“Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” will use geospatial tools to further the audience’s
understanding of not only why Chicago’s South Side appeared the way it did between 1900 and
1920 but also how its appearance is also historically significant. Whereas interactive geospatial
history is relatively commonplace within the digital space, the culturally- and historically-rich
South Side has not yet received similar treatment. This project will use existing digital tools to
populate an interactive map of the South Side with historically significant locations and
seamlessly link each location to a contextual narrative that connects the location with a broader
theme in Chicago’s history.
Understanding the South Side is important to a variety of fields in history. Chicago, like many
Midwestern towns and cities, underwent dramatic expansion during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, largely as a result of westward movement and rapid industrial
growth. As part of Chicago’s expansion, the city was receiving an unprecedented number of
immigrants and first-generation Americans; over seventy percent of Chicago’s population was
composed of foreign stock in 1920. By the early twentieth century, the ill-effects of hasty
urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration were apparent to progressive reformers
who attempted to ameliorate such ill-effects. Progressives’ reforms focused on many aspects
of life, including efforts in the areas of education, leisure, the workplace, and urban planning.
None of these historical phenomena are entirely unique to Chicago or its South Side, but each
of these phenomena did coalesce there, making the South Side a microcosm of the wider
historical trends occurring throughout urban and industrial America at the turn of the twentieth
century.1
“Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” will have three major components: 1) an
interactive map of the South Side populated with pins of historically significant locations; 2) a
repository of digital or digitized images (with metadata) that will be used to accompany a
specific pin on the map. Each location will receive a tag that represents a larger theme in the
South Side’s history (i.e., Work, Leisure and Sport, Worship, Racial and Ethnic Relations, and
1
See Appendix A for a selected bibliography on Chicago history in this time period.
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Transportation) and a brief description about that location’s significance; and 3) contextual
narratives associated with each tag that will explicate the relationship of the tagged locations as
a group to the history of the South Side. Level II funding is required in order to develop this
project into a working prototype. Specifically, funding will be used to gather and sort digital
sources, digitize print sources as necessary, and construct alpha and beta versions of the
project.
This project will use existing tools, eliminating the need to develop new tools and allowing for
total focus to center on the quality of the finished prototype. The use of existing tools,
however, will not hamper this project’s innovation. The project will provide the audience with
the ability to interact with the history of the South Side on multiple levels. The visual elements
of the map will include several filters and layers to add to the map’s interactivity: a) the ability
to filter map pins according to tags associated with the pins; b) the ability to see map
annotations that denote the primary ethnic or racial group living in particular areas; and c) the
ability to layer historical maps over a generated map.
In addition the map’s interactive features, the project will display innovation by allowing the
user to access information in a variety of ways: a) browsing by tag category (e.g., navigating
directly to a section on leisure from a menu); b) selecting locations from the map and viewing
information only about those locations; c) accessing sections on tag categories from map items
associated with those categories (e.g., navigating to a section on worship from the information
provided for a church); and d) finding a location, tag category, or keyword from a search field.
The sources used for this project will come primarily from digital repositories of historical
images. Because a main objective of this project is to allow the audience to explore the South
Side as it was between 1900 and 1920, a high priority will be set on using images produced
during this period. Such a priority also poses one of the greatest challenges to this project, as
existing digital repositories may not hold images within the target date range. In this case, the
project will use images produced as closely to the target date range as possible. All items will
note when the image was produced and any changes that may have occurred to the location’s
appearance when viewing the location’s description and image’s metadata.
“Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” will be built in Omeka, an open source webpublishing platform built by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and is
compatible with numerous plugins available for increased functionality.2 The project will use
Omeka to store sources and present the final product through the use of the Neatline and
Exhibit Builder plugins. Neatline, built by the Scholars’ Lab, can be used to create maps,
annotations, and narratives using existing Omeka items. 3 This project will use Neatline to build
the interactive map, populate it with locations, and add annotations. This project will use
2
Amanda Morton, “Digital Tools: Zotero and Omeka,” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2011): 952-53; Roy
Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, http://www.omeka.org.
3
Bethany Nowviskie, David McClure, Wayne Graham, Adam Soroka, Jeremy Boggs and Eric Rochester, “GeoTemporal Interpretation of Archival Collections with Neatline,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 28, no. 4
(2013): 692-699; Scholars’ Lab, http://www.neatline.org.
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Exhibit Builder to construct the contextual narratives relating to each tag category. Using
Omeka allows the project to have multiple components that are easily constructed and
integrated while ensuring that the project is easily maintained. Omeka also allows for
contributions from outside parties, opening up the possibility for those not directly affiliated
with the project to contribute sources, annotations, and text. Although it is not within the
scope of this project’s prototype phase to do so, such a capability speaks to the future promise
of the project’s lifespan.
The project will enable a critical, interactive examination of Chicago’s South Side in the first
twenty years of the twentieth century. The combination of thematic contextual narratives and
an interactive map will provide the user not only with an opportunity to explore the hallmark
issues of the South Side’s history but also be able to see how those issues physically manifested
themselves in the South Side’s geography without dictating the way in which the user does so.
For instance, the user may read about the City Beautiful Movement and its focus on providing
open spaces available to the South Side’s working class. The user may then interact with the
map to determine the extent to which this particular goal of the City Beautiful Movement was
successful by examining the parks built relative to working-class neighborhoods. Conversely,
the user may decide to first view the map and notice that large parks appear to have been
constructed within close proximity to neighborhoods of differing ethnicities. By clicking on one
of the parks, the user could then learn about that particular park and subsequently navigate to
the broader narrative on leisure in the South Side. Because “Mapping Chicago’s South Side,
1900-1920” is not designed to funnel the user through a particular directed path, the user has
the opportunity to develop and further investigate research questions on the users’ own terms.
Because of the wide range of historical themes in play when investigating the South Side, the
project will also appeal to users with a wide range of research interests. “Mapping Chicago’s
South Side, 1900-1920” will be germane to the train of users with interests in—but not limited
to—immigration, race, religion, sport and leisure, public policy, Progressivism, and urban
planning. The project will accommodate the exploration of such interests by including a diverse
set of map locations and providing in-depth contextual narratives.
The intended primary audience for the project is post-secondary students of history and their
instructors. Students can use the project as a gateway to the issues of Chicago history as well
as the fields that use Chicago as a setting for historical inquiry. Instructors may use the project
as a teaching tool to supplement lectures, enhance class discussions, and extend learning
beyond the classroom. The project will assume a high school-level base of knowledge from the
user, making the project also accessible to large portions of the public with interests in
American history.
Environmental Scan
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Digitized versions of historical maps are widely available online. The Library of Congress has
digitized over 11,000 maps ranging in date from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries.4 The
maps’ geographic foci are both domestic and international. Holdings are searchable by
language, location, collections to which they belong, contributors, date, and subject. The
University of Illinois at Chicago also has an impressive collection of digitized maps from a host
of sources organized into specific categories.5 The collection is mostly composed of maps
related to the neighborhoods surrounding Jane Addams’s Hull-House. The Electronic
Encyclopedia of Chicago, through the Chicago History Society, has an index of digitized maps
from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.6 But these repositories only display the maps
as images with little to no ability to interact with the maps or the locations contained within
them. The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago has made their maps available in the format of
Adobe Flash, which is somewhat interactive, but it constricts interactivity to rotating the image
or zooming in on a specific area without improving resolution.
The use of interactive maps as a form of digital scholarship, though, is becoming more
commonplace. “Mapping Boston’s Religions, 1800-1880,” the product of a digital history
seminar at Brandeis University, uses Neatline to plot a map of religious institutions in
nineteenth-century Boston. 7 The map displays the duration of each institution’s existence
using a scrollable timeline. The user may then read more about a particular institution by
clicking on the location’s marker. A framing essay outlines the background, goals, and
methodology of the project. Stephanie Krom has also created an interactive map using
Neatline as part of a larger exhibit on the Whiskey Rebellion.8 Clicking on the marked location
of an event brings up images and a narrative describing that location. These projects
demonstrate the utility of using Neatline and the possibility of map interactivity. However, no
such map yet exists for the South Side in particular or Chicago in general.
Existing projects are similar in content and methodology but not entirely overlapping. The
digitized maps of Chicago are one dimensional in terms of usability and offer no insight into
their significance beyond simple observation. Moreover, the maps’ host repositories do not put
the maps into conversation with one another to give a broader, more analytical presentation.
While the surveyed interactive maps are more closely aligned with the design goals of this
project, they provide little or no narrative that links the pinned location to the broader
historical themes of their topics. The larger historical narrative is placed in a separate section
with no direct link to the map itself. “Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” will build
upon both sets of projects by aggregating information from different sets of maps in order to
4
Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/maps/.
University of Illinois at Chicago, “Urban Experience in Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963,”
http://hullhouse.uic.edu/hull/urbanexp/geography/geography.htm.
6
Chicago History Society, The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago,
http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/700029.html.
7
Steven Colon, Caro Langenbucher, Imogen Rosenbluth, and Zi Jing Teoh, “Mapping Boston’s Religions, 18001880,” http://omeka.lts.brandeis.edu/neatline/show/mapping-bostons-religions.
8
Stephanie Krom, “The Whiskey Rebellion: An Interactive Mapping Project,”
http://omeka.digitalpubs.nyu.edu/whiskeyrebellion/interactive-map.
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show a unified expression of the maps’ content. This project will also integrate its two main
parts—the interactive map and contextual narratives—so that the user can seamlessly navigate
between locations on the interactive map and the contextual narratives. The result will be a
more cohesive experience for the user.
History and Duration of the Project
This project was born in fall 2015 from a research project conducted on the relationship
between the Progressive movement and baseball in Chicago. It became clear that better
research would result if maps were available to illustrate what demographics lived in which
parts of the city. Hours of research turned up only unsatisfactory results. Maps were difficult
to read, scattered throughout various repositories, or were not illustrative of the period under
study.
Enrollment in Clio: Wired, an introductory course on digital history theory and methods at
George Mason University, provided the next step in developing this project. Students in this
course are tasked with developing digital history projects that are germane to their trains of
research using methods explored in class. “Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” was
developed as a means of both fulfilling this class requirement and augmenting further research
about the South Side during the early twentieth century.
Work began during the same semester on acquiring digital images to be used in the project,
inputting the appropriate metadata, and building a digital collection in Omeka. A sample
contextual narrative was developed in Exhibit Builder using several of the images in order to
demonstrate how the project would explicate the broader historical themes. Simultaneously,
work went into investigating the types of tools necessary to complete the project. By the end
of the fall 2015 semester, an alpha version of the project will be completed and ready for
further development.
“Mapping Chicago’s South Side, 1900-1920” is a multi-year project as part of ongoing
scholarship in the Progressive Era and digital history. NEH funding will go toward producing
alpha and beta versions of the project by the end of the eighteen-month grant period. The
project staff will seek additional funding through further grant opportunities in the humanities.
Work Plan
Phase One (Fall 2015-Winter 2015): Source collection; metadata input; contextual narrative
research and writing; interactive map construction; creation of a working alpha prototype; draft
white paper
Phase Two (Spring 2016-Summer 2016): Source collection; metadata input; contextual narrative
research and writing; additional interactive map functionality;
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Phase Three (Fall 2016-Winter 2017): Source collection; metadata input; addition of historical
map overlays; addition of search functionality
Phase Four (Spring 2017-Summer 2017: Launch beta version; develop plan for support and
maintenance of the project; draft white paper
Post-Start Up: Explore opportunities for collaboration; publicize the project through digital
humanities websites and conferences; strategize launch of finished product
Technical Resources Required: All work will be completed on personal computers. Server space
is provided through Reclaim Hosting, and the final project will reside at
http://www.justinbroubalow.net. All software used will be open-source or already installed on
work computers.
Staff
Justin Broubalow (Director). Master of Arts in History student, George Mason University. Mr.
Broubalow is interested in the impact of this project on the history of ethnicity and religion. He
will be responsible for meeting with staff and guiding the design of the project.
Paul Lennon (Assistant Director). Assistant Professor of History, George Mason University.
Prof. Lennon is interested in the impact of this project on the history of public policy and urban
planning. He will be responsible for the construction of the project.
John McCartney (Associate Director). Assistant Professor of History, George Mason University.
Prof. McCartney is interested in the impact of this project on the history of sport and society.
He will be responsible for writing historical narratives and location descriptions.
All staff are active participants in projects at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center
for History and New Media.
We plan to fund one graduate student to collect sources and input necessary metadata.
George Mason University’s Ph.D. program is particularly strong in digital history.
Final Product and Dissemination
The alpha and beta versions of the product will be available as an open-source Omeka exhibit.
It will reside at the website of the director, http://www.justinbroubalow.net/omeka. We
expect that the final version of the project will be available at its own branded Web address
when completed.
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9. Appendices
Appendix A
Selected Bibliography
Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: MacMillan, 1954.
Adler, Jeffrey. First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt: Homicide in Chicago, 1875-1920. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Bachin, Robin F. Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Barth, Gunther. City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Gems, Gerald R. Windy City Wars: Labor, Leisure, and Sport in the Making of Chicago. Lanham,
Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997.
Guglielmo, Thomas A. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Pacyga, Dominic A. Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 18801922. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1991.
Shaw, Stephen J. The Catholic Parish as a Way-Station of Ethnicity and Americanization:
Chicago’s Germans and Italians, 1903-1939. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1991.
Smith, Carl. Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket
Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
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