A Participant’s Perspective of Mapping Freedom: An NSF-REU Opportunity at Southern Miss
By Sydney Slack
The “Mapping Freedom” National Science Foundation – Research Experience for Undergraduates at The University of Southern Mississippi was first introduced to me when my department chair forwarded an email about the program to all York College of Pennsylvania history majors. I was in the midst of looking for a summer public history internship to add to my resume and put my classroom knowledge to practical use. Mapping Freedom in particular drew my attention because it was an opportunity to get a feel for creating educational tools in a totally new location and with a unique group of people. As I would like to pursue informal education as a career, Mapping Freedom offered an opportunity to experience that before graduation in a different way than what I had already experienced working at a science center.
During the spring semester just before the program, I completed a Digital Public History course and an introductory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) course. While I had put a lot of focus into my public history work, since that is more in line with what I would like to do long term, I did not really put much emphasis on GIS as I didn’t believe it would be as relevant to my career. However, I knew it would be a significant part of this program, and so I looked forward to the opportunity to expand my knowledge beyond that intro course.
Sydney Slack
Sydney Slack is a senior forensic chemistry and history dual major at York College of Pennsylvania. She plans to continue onto graduate school focusing on Museum Studies, and pursue a career in informal science education.
Once Mapping Freedom started, and we were given more information about exactly what we’d be doing, I explored the various tags in the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) collection. I was looking for a topic that both interested me and had enough relevant letters to be worth visualizing through GIS. The Ladies Military Aid Societies in Mississippi provided the perfect sub-collection of letters for me to focus on. Women’s history has long been an interest of mine, especially women’s work during wartime. I’ve learned a lot of how women were moved to action during the world wars, but not as much during the American Civil War. Additionally, the Ladies Aid Society tag was not only self-contained, but had over fifty letters that could be mapped, categorized, and analyzed.
After deciding on a topic, I did just that. I recorded the metadata (location, people to/from, dates) for all the letters and categorized them based on their primary subject. Most were about making or shipping clothing to soldiers, but some also concerned donating money or the creation of hospitals. However, the letters provided little to no indication of occupation, wealth, class, etc. for these women, and I decided I needed more historical context on Confederate women during the war. So, while I explored secondary texts, I considered how the information I gained from the letters supported or countered what has already been argued. In the end, I was able to use the letters to support my argument that the intentions of women going into the Civil War were not congruent with the outcomes that they eventually benefitted from (suffrage).
As part of my argument, I used GIS to map the locations of the letters’ place-of-origin, symbolized by the category. I then compared these locations to population and wealth data of Mississippi counties, to see if any correlations could be drawn. What I found laid the groundwork for my argument, that the letters were coming from wealthier counties, meaning they were likely written by wealthier women.
Dr. Kayla Stan, a program faculty member and Assistant Professor of Geography at Southern Miss, introduced us to two GIS software systems, QGIS and ArcGIS during Mapping Freedom. I largely preferred the latter as it directly connects to ArcGIS StoryMaps, making the process of building the maps easier from the start. But beyond that, I think the way ArcGIS allows you to symbolize the data in a variety of ways is really useful for manipulating the data to show different trends. For example, utilizing hotspot symbolization was useful for showing where the letters were grouped, but just normal color symbolization was preferable for showing the amount of letters in each category. QGIS also has these capabilities, but I didn’t find them to be as user friendly, and the Arc Maps could be more easily created into apps that could be transferred to my website.
I don’t believe that my future career is one that will require me to work with many of the platforms I used this summer, but I also can’t say that I will never use them. Either way, having the skills to use these platforms means I have another option available to me when it comes to visualizing data with geographic components. Additionally, the skills I learned this summer regarding research and digital humanities are things that I will take with me into graduate school and my career. Knowing which resources are available to me is just as valuable as knowing how to use them.
I think the biggest thing I can take away from Mapping Freedom is that I am capable of completing a real, professional research project. Up until this point, my research experience has been limited course projects and therefore only subject to the teacher’s or my peers’ criticism. This was a “real” project that I could refine and publish, if I so desired.
The other thing I keep telling everyone who asks about my summer is that the best part was the people. I met so many wonderful people, who I hope to keep in touch with, and I learned so much from hearing about their experiences and the research they were doing!
Check out Sydney’s—and her cohort’s—projects here: mappingfreedomreu.org/2023-cohort
