Do the Data Strike Back? Students’ Presentations of Historical Narratives About Latino Communities Using Geographic Information Systems

• In Event: Tools for Constructing Historical Narratives: Teaching African American and Latino Histories With GIS Census Maps

Abstract

This paper presents work done in undergraduate classrooms, funded by a National Science Foundation CCLI (Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement) grant, in which the authors have collaborated with college instructors to promote historical and social inquiry using Social Explorer, an online GIS data mapping tool for accessing historical census data. The authors analyzed the kinds of narratives about Latino communities that emerged in two undergraduate classrooms in which students were assigned to research and present particular aspects of the histories of selected Chicago neighborhoods.

The analysis focuses on properties of the GIS maps as cultural tools (Wertsch, 1998), serving as mediational means that afforded and constrained particular interactions between specific narratives (Wertsch, 2004) about Latino communities on the one hand, and spatio-temporal distributions of the geo-referenced census datasets on the other. Both the datasets and the specific narratives were treated as available designs (New London Group, 1996) for use by the presenting students, and the analysis examined ways they were incorporated into the redesigned narratives produced in each presentation. Of particular interest was the agency of the data distributions themselves, and the agency attributable to the historical actors who are purportedly represented by those data (Latour, 2000).

The data corpus for the analysis was drawn from an undergraduate Latino & Latin American Studies course, in which the instructor assigned students to use an online GIS census data tool conduct research on particular communities with sizeable Latino populations. Eight videotaped student presentations were transcribed, including documentation of each spoken or gestured reference to a GIS data map, and the full set of these references was analyzed using a grounded theory methodology for eliciting the meanings inherent in each reference, as contextualized by the larger narrative emergent in the presentation. Six categories of references were identified:
• Reference to people
• Reference to a place
• Characterization of a quantity or proportion
• Characterization of a spatial pattern
• Comparison of multiple places, quantities, or patterns
• Characterization of a change
The researchers analyzed the ways each presenting student assembled a historical narrative using these six elements, including both internal coherences and contradictions that emerged in each narrative.

The analysis suggests four central tensions for constructing historical narratives about communities using GIS tools:
• Highlighting (Goodwin, 1994; Lynch, 1990) focal geographies in a narrative
• Problematizing racial categories in characterizations of historical census data
• Humanizing quantitative elements of narratives
• Mathematizing historical change
A cross-case analysis of how the different groups of students managed these tensions provides a broader picture of the affordances and constraints of GIS mapping tools for constructing meaningful historical narratives about Latino populations and communities.

Authors

• Jessica Roberts, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Joshua L. Radinsky, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Jose W. Melendez, University of Illinois at Chicago