In 1896 sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was invited by the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia’s College Settlement Association to conduct a survey that was the basis for the 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro. The survey focused on blacks living in the seventh ward, defined as the area in Center City between Spruce Street and South Street, from Seventh Street east to the Schuylkill River.
Du Bois lived in Philadelphia for a year during which he went door-to-door, interviewing each of the several thousand black households. He classified each of them by social class according to his own judgment and used colors to represent each group on a map of the seventh ward. Unfortunately, the actual individual data he collected in 1896 no longer exists. What we do have, however, is a map that he produced, showing the social class for the households in this area.
A historic W.E.B DuBois map (c. 1896) mapping data on blacks living in Philadelphia’s 7th ward.
In 2005 a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, led by project director, Amy Hillier – Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the School of Design, began collecting and mapping historical demographic and spatial data about Philadelphia’s old seventh ward at the time of Du Bois’ study. Their goal for the project, called “Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro” and funded by the National Endowment for Humanities, was to use historical data in a modern GIS system to allow scholars and students to explore the historic area of the seventh ward and the people who lived there, and perform their own analyses, in much the same way that Du Bois himself would have. Additionally, the “Mapping Du Bois” team hopes to provide valuable research tools to middle- and high-school students in order for them to more clearly understand the black experience in Philadelphia at the turn of the century.
Azavea was invited to partner with “Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro” to develop a web application that would enable the recently collected project data to be viewed and analyzed spatially by users. The application uses ESRI’s ArcGIS Server software as a mapping engine and the ESRI’s WebADF for the inclusion of dynamic maps on the web site. Click here to access the beta version of the application (best viewed in IE). A complete version of the application with even more exciting features will be released in a few weeks… so stay tuned!
The application gives students the opportunity to map many different data points, such as race, immigrant status, and household population, across the old seventh ward. Users can simultaneously view the data on modern GIS analysis map layers as well as on the historic maps Du Bois created. Development on the map is ongoing, but one of the chief challenges has been the shape of the Old Seventh Ward – it is a wide strip the cuts across the south edge of what we would now consider ‘Center City’, but is only a few blocks high. This has required a web interface that is a bit different from the norm.
