Dedicated to advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present, and future of western North America, the Center supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Envisioning California's Delta As It Was
California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has been transformed from a teeming wetland to valuable farmland, cities and towns, and a vast network of reservoirs and canals carrying a great part of the state's water supply from where it originates to where it is needed. With the Delta's ecosystem in crisis and difficult policy decisions looming, the Bill Lane Center for the American West has co-produced an innovative interactive exploration of the historical Delta in collaboration with KQED Public Media and the San Francisco Estuary Institute-Aquatic Science Center.
"Envisioning California's Delta As it Was" is an online companion to a series of radio reports by reporter Lauren Sommer on KQED's science and environment program, QUEST. Using more than 20 pages of interactive maps, charts and archival imagery, the feature guides readers through the wealth of historical clues that researchers at SFEI's Aquatic Science Center used to envision what the Delta was like before the Gold Rush, the creation of the rich farmlands, the State Water Project., and other major developments. SFEI's research, led by Alison Whipple, a former intern at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, is culminating in a major report on the historical ecology of the Delta, due out in June.
This spring, QUEST reporter Lauren Sommer was a media fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West and worked extensively with SFEI and the Center's creative director of media and communication, Geoff McGhee, to mine the wealth of research materials to create a radio documentary and interactive guide to the report.
The interactive feature is available at QUEST's website. A radio documentary on the historical detective work behind the report "Can We Bring Back What We've Lost?" airs Monday morning, May 14 on KQED and California public radio stations, and can be heard online at KQED.org.
Mapping Texts: Visualizing Historical American Newspapers
The Mapping Texts project, a collaboration between the University of North Texas and the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, has just released two stunning new interactive visualizations that allow users to map language patterns embedded in 230,000 pages of digitized historical newspapers from the late 1820s through the early 2000s.
Sponsored by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project team—led by Andrew J. Torget from UNT and Jon Christensen from Stanford—spent the last eighteen months experimenting with developing new methods for finding and analyzing patterns embedded in massive collections of historical newspapers.
"One thing I find particularly compelling about this project," says Brett Bobley, chief information officer at the NEH and director of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, "is that since all the National Digital Newspaper Project pages are created using the same standards, work like the Mapping Texts project could, in theory, scale beyond the Texas newspapers to other states or even nationally. As we scan millions of pages of newspapers (and other humanities materials) new methods for searching and analyzing the materials will become critical to scholarship."
The primary goal of the Mapping Texts project, explains Torget, “was to find new ways for people to make sense of the overwhelming abundance of information being made available in the digital age. Historical newspapers are being digitized at an astonishing rate. The Chronicling America project, for example, now provides access to over four million pages. People are going to need new ways to make sense of such massive and rich collections, because when you can explore hundreds of millions of words a basic text search simply isn’t enough.”
The project focused on a collection of historical Texas newspapers digitized by the University of North Texas Library as part of Chronicling America’s National Digital Newspaper Program. Together, the UNT and Stanford teams experimented with ways to combine text-mining (to find patterns in the collection) and data visualization (to make sense of them) in order to produce new visual indexes of the newspapers.
“By mapping the contents of these newspapers across both time and space, as well as the quality of the OCR digitization,” says Christensen, “we aimed not just to reveal patterns and surprises in the collection that you simply would not otherwise see, but also to give researchers a concrete sense of what information is and what information is not available to them in a large digital archive.”
The results are two interactive visualizations:
(1) “Mapping Newspaper Quality” maps a quantitative survey of the newspapers, plotting both the quantity and quality of information available in the digitized collection. Through graphs, timelines, and a regional map, users can explore the quantity of information available for any particular time period, location, or newspaper, as well as the quality of the digitization of the newspapers. By clicking on individual newspaper titles, users can also access the original newspaper pages.
(2) “Mapping Language Patterns” maps a qualitative survey of the newspapers, plotting major language patterns embedded in the collection. For any given time period, geography, or newspaper title, users can explore the most common words (word counts), named entities (people, places, etc), and highly correlated words (topic models), which together provide a window into the major language patterns emanating from the newspapers. Users can also click on individual newspaper titles to access the original documents.
For more on the project, including the project's technical white paper and links to the visualizations, please visit: http://mappingtexts.org/.
Are Western Communities Getting a Fair Return on Energy Development?
With sky-high energy prices driving new oil and gas exploration in the American West, states are struggling to keep pace with critical infrastructure and revenue policies. Western North Dakota, for example, is in the throes of a raging energy boom, as hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling techniques coax valuable hydrocarbons out of long-dormant oilfields. But as towns like Williston see their populations double virtually overnight and vital farm-to-market roads crumble under 18-wheel trucks, how best to ensure that local communities can survive the onslaught, and to reap rewards that benefit the whole state, long after the boom is over?
Working with Montana-based Headwaters Economics, The Center's Rural West Initiative has published a comprehensive multimedia report online, combining a rigorous economic and policy analysis with a 31-minute interactive video documentary called "An Unquiet Landscape: The American West's New Energy Frontier."
The video feature, reported by the intiative's director, John McChesney, looks at three rural western communities at different stages of the process of energy development: North Dakota, where a recent drilling frenzy has pushed it to the third-highest oil production in the U.S.; western Wyoming, where residents are coping with air pollution and habitat destruction after a decade of oil and gas exploration; and eastern Wyoming, where residents of one of the state's poorest communities pin their hopes on a boom on the local Niobrara formation.
"Energy development is arguably the greatest force transforming the rural West today," says McChesney, who came to direct the Bill Lane Center for the American West's Rural West Initiative after three decades at NPR.
The video report is published in an innovative format, an annotated, interactive player that presents supplementary information at key points in the documentary. "The player combines the benefits of powerful video storytelling with the precision of print and the linked nature of the web," says Geoff McGhee, the Center's Creative Director, who was a co-producer of the video. The team will be sharing the source code for the interactive player under an open source, creative commons license for noncommercial reuse.
The Headwaters report can be downloaded in its entirety from the Rural West Initiative website.
