Historical Geographies of Chicagoland
Funded through CROCUS at the Argonne National Laboratory and a research award from the SEEKCommons Project (NSF FAIROS RCN Award 2226425), I am leading a team in analyzing historical patterns of industrial land use and fossil fuel development in the Chicago area. We develop new approaches to understanding the environmental dimensions of urbanization, broadly conceived, through targeted analytics that extract novel information from underutilized archives. Ongoing data collection includes (1) filling gaps in historical data on urban built environments by digitizing records held in local archives; (2) developing computer vision and machine learning methods to extract a wide range of fossil fuel-related sites from historical atlases; and (3) linking text analysis and spatial methodologies to develop new data on social-environmental change in cities.
See below for a partial reconstruction of early 20th century fossil fuel geographies in Chicagoland. New data will be added as these projects continue. ↓