I LOVE maps, and in this internship I am gaining hands-on experience with creating maps for a digital public history project in Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy. I am thankful that I love maps so much, because that love keeps me going when the confusion and frustration often take over. 

We were introduced to digital public history mapping projects in the intro class of this program over a year ago. We explored several digital mapping applications, such as using conveniently compiled .csv files on the WPA Slave Narratives to put into the open-source Kepler geo spatial analysis program. Here we were able to manipulate the data to show various geographic elements of data contained in the Slave Narratives. One could explore where an interviewee was born vs. where he or she was interviewed in order to get an idea of mobility of African-Americans after the Civil War. One could also create maps showing common word usage, interviewee gender, and various other variables that were contained in the .csv files. Oh, it was fun. The maps looked fabulous. It was all so simple!

For my project for that particular class, I played around with creating my own basic .csv file from data I got in a volume of the Jesuit Relations. Since the Relation was from a single year, the only variables in the spreadsheet were location (as best as I could figure) and mention of flora and/or fauna. I uploaded this very rudimentary .csv file to Kepler.gl and, lo and behold, there was a map with the information on it! Was it glorious? No. Did it allow for the manipulation of data to look for patterns or comparisons? Also, no. It was the ultra beginner’s stick-person version of a digital public history mapping project. 

Then came my change to work with Dr. Madden on her Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy project. I quickly saw the collaborative nature of the project, as we learned all DPH projects are. I was finally introduced to GIS programs through QGIS and ArcGIS. Then came the big reveal that began with my stick person version of a DPH mapping project. Someone has to create those .csv files, and for a nuanced and truly significant DPH mapping project, the creator of those files must think a LOT on what to include and how to record it. There is no two-column spreadsheet like I did for my Intro to DPH project, and that’s BEFORE you geolocate all this information. I am in the process of creating a spreadsheet from a particular source for the Mapping Violence project, and with each entry in the source I wonder exactly how the information should be recorded. If there are multiple names in the entry and multiple locations, are they all entered separately? Do you associate a location with a specific name? What about the weapons? Are those allocated to each person in the entry or specific ones? How about the fact that the spelling isn’t always uniform? Do you choose one spelling? Do you include multiple? AAAHHHHH. As I told Dr. Madden at the beginning of the semester, I understood a lot of what she was talking about “in theory,” but, yes, the practice is less cut and dry. I’m glad she is patient, and I am glad that I love this stuff!