When I visited Los Angeles two years ago I did not expect to see the bizarre car-culture frenzy that I did. A monstrosity urban sprawl, coupled with inadequate public transit, made it almost impossible to get anywhere without a car. I selected the Los Angeles Guide because I was interested to see whether the private ownership of a car had always impacted tourism and the ability to move through space in LA. Although the Guide notes railroad stations, bus stations, services, and streetcars, in the general information section of the book, it does not make any reference to them throughout the tours. The Guide assumes that the audience owns an automobile and this implies multiple things. The first is that Guide seems to be created for an affluent audience who owns automobiles and has the time for leisure activities. This is reaffirmed by the landmarks that Tour 6 focuses on, such as a mineral spring, multiple camp sites, and private beaches. But more importantly, the assumption that the audience owns a car also implies that makers of the Guide knew that cars would play a significant role in America’s future. They even note that “the Los Angeles of the future is likely to evolve along highways.” 1
Similar to most other things we have learned about in this class, maps do not offer an inherently impartial and “objective” perspective on history. It’s easy to forget that maps are also manmade and subject to the bias of the creator. Power and privilege must be taken into consideration when using maps and analyzing spatial history, otherwise mapping can very easily become a tool of oppression.
Digital mapping can be useful for historians because “it can allow us to reconstruct, preserve, and visualize vestiges of the past.”2 Mapping Tour 6 on StoryMapJS was helpful because it allowed me to see how the urban sprawl was taken into consideration when selecting points of interest for the tours. Although it was slightly difficult to find the exact locations of certain places because some of them did not exist anymore.
The “Navigating the Green Book” project allowed me to see how compressed a “tour” would have been for an African American traveler in 1947. In comparison to the original tour, which spanned a larger distance, safe spaces for Black individuals would only involve a couple miles between West Hollywood and Central LA, with just three hotel accommodations. The comparison of these two geographic visualizations can be useful in helping people understand how radically different it is to navigate this country in a non-white body. As Sarah Bond argues, digital humanities projects can go beyond “amusing data aggregation” and they can actually create a deeper understanding about the impacts of racism.3
- Los Angeles; a guide to the city and its environs, https://archive.org/details/losangelesguidet00writrich, Tour 379-387.
- Sarah Emily Bond, Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities, https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/
- Sarah Emily Bond, Mapping Racism And Assessing the Success of the Digital Humanities, https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/20/mapping-racism-and-assessing-the-success-of-the-digital-humanities/
