Building and Diversity With Parish House

John Mullan and I are planning to do a DH project on how Parish House impacted the growth of the international student body at Carleton. The objective of this project is to display how the college’s effort to create a space for international students translated to enrollment in the student body. Additionally, we will go over the history of Parish house itself and try to uncover why and how the building was used before it was used as a dorm.

Sources: We plan to use the Carleton online archive as a starting point. Then, we are in the process of getting an appointment to dig into Carleton’s physical archives for more detailed information. The last step is to contact alumni who may have lived in Parish and get their personal stories.

Processes: We plan to use Geoeditor for the map of international students that attended Carleton. This will require us to use CSV files and other data warehouse tools to input. We might use statistical techniques to analyze enrollment data. We also plan to digitize pictures from the physical archives and other online sources.

Presentation: We will graph our statistical findings on international student enrollment. If we have enough data, we could show a data timeline on a map of international student enrollment. We will also show pictures of what we found in the physical archives.

Timeline: Enrollment Data: Friday, Feb 15th. Physical Archive data on Parish House: Friday, Feb 22nd. Website Construction: Friday, March 9th

Timeline Example: https://apps.carleton.edu/150/timeline/

Historical Map Example: https://worldpopulationhistory.org/map/1/mercator/1/0/25/

Author: Kwaku

1 thought on “Building and Diversity With Parish House

  1. This sounds like a really interesting project, Kwaku. I like how you and John are taking the specific history of Parish house as your starting point, but seeking to expand out to include other relevant datasets and tell multiple stories that intersect with the building.

    A few suggestions: 1) for mapping, the kind of thing you want to do is probably better accomplished with ArcGIS online or Carto than GeoEditor, which is primarily a tool for digitizing features from scanned historical map layers. There are many different ways to highlight change over time on a map. Some of the ways to map time in ESRI’s StoryMaps are described on this post.

    2) For alumni stories, you might start by looking through the many oral histories already recorded by alums in the Recordings – Oral History, 1971-2018 archive (Expand the Online Images/Records link to see all the digitized holdings).

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