Dennison:

For the first chapter of my map, it seemed fitting to focus on the town that gave the quadrangle its name, Dennison. Although perhaps not the most interesting town, it has history nonetheless, and I tried to capture some of that in its page. Particularly, I included the map of the Chicago Great Western railroad as a way to show the significance of a railroad on the development of towns like Dennison. Namely, having one or not having one can significantly impact the growth of a town in the long run. Of course, there are certainly other factors which play into the development of towns, like water features such as rivers, but railroads, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries were paramount to the growth of smaller towns across the country.

Ultimately, though, I struggled to make use of ArcGIS and sufficient digital technologies. In part, I feel this was due to my focus on Unity and the hope that a functioning, somewhat impressive Unity game would suffice in encapsulating the history and meaning of the town as a place. Perhaps through a more focused topic of research in Dennison I could have done so. Specifically, I believe I missed an opportunity to reflect a piece of history by not focusing on something such as the veterans of Dennison and the rest of the quadrangle. If I could repeat this project, an inclusion of a more human narrative could be quite effective.

Stanton:

Originally, my ambitions for the Stanton chapter of my deep map were much loftier than the ultimate outcome. For one, although I always intended to focus on the Stanton Airfield, I could have been inclusive of the town and surrounding area as a whole. One example of a missed opportunity in regards to Stanton is the lack of a comparative element between Dennison and Stanton. In my experience, although Dennison is larger, the two towns seem to have taken very different developmental paths, with Stanton seemingly emerging as the more successful of the two. My narrow focus on the Stanton Airfield fails to encapsulate this dichotomy. However, I do think that a large part of the difference between the two is a result of the airfield, and that is essentially implied by my focus.

Much like Dennison, though, there was much untapped potential in Stanton which I failed to take advantage of. Specifically, Stanton was also a depot along the Chicago Great Western railroad and its development was thus impacted significantly by the absence of it. That being said, the importance of the Stanton Airfield warrants a large amount of focus, and I believe using it as the focal point of the chapter is justified.

Koester Prairie:

The third chapter of my deep map, Koester Prairie, was the chapter most closely related to the natural landscape and an understanding of place. As such, my reliance on Professor Kim Smith’s class’s work is unsurprising. While on the one hand I feel that I should have used ArcGIS to create my own map of the biodiversity of the WMA, using the publicly available map her students made seemed like the most prudent path to take. Similarly, the oral histories collected by her students directly related to the sense of place I aimed to capture through my focus on Koester Prairie. As such I included a small segment from Craig Koester that discusses some the importance place and being connected to the land.

Of course, like the other chapters of my deep map, a deeper focus on one or two elements of the Koester Prairie would have proven enlightening. In addition, I think that I missed out on some of the potential of digital technologies which could have painted a broader picture of the Koester Prairie in the context of southeastern Minnesota and the Dennison quadrangle.