ALTHE2 Proposal
Proposal: The Chicago Geographic Imagebase
Sponsored by: THE CITY DESIGN CENTER, UIC; Art History Department, UIC; Urban Planning Program, UIC; Geography Program, UIC; School of Architecture, UIC
What this project intends to do is to create a powerful tool that will facilitate teaching and research in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences throughout the University. Ultimately a click on a given block on a base map will yield both visual images- photographs of buildings, building plans, sections and elevations, fire insurance and other maps, air and satellite views- and text-based and quantitative data- census data, building permits, land title information and even literary descriptions. This system will ultimately allow students to access in a few minutes what had previously taken scholars days or even weeks in specialized libraries and archives. Using fire insurance maps from 1880, 1920 and 1955, maps from the famous Survey of Residential Land undertaken by the WPA in 1939 and the data sheets from the Chicago Commission on Landmarks survey of the city, a student working on a neighborhood in the Near West Side could trace the evolution of residential building types over the last century. Using census data, building permits and recent aerial photography another student could study issues of abandonment and arson in the Mid-South Side.
Much of this material already exists at the University but in formats that make access difficult. The slide library of the College of Architecture and the Arts, for example, is a major repository of images (it contains over 350,000 slides), but logistical obstacles prevent it from being readily accessible to students. Both UIC and UIUC have collections of manuscript fire insurance maps, but these volumes are rare and fragile. Under current funding digitization is underway on the UIC maps. We would like to expand this effort to Urbana and to explore with the Chicago Historical Society and other research institutions the possibility of digitizing and putting on-line their collections for student use.
Local, county and state agencies also have a tremendous store of vital information. This data is often already on-line, but it is scattered throughout many agencies, is difficult to access and, unlike the case in many American cities, is not linked to any kind of unified GIS system. We would like to explore with several of these agencies how public information can be coordinated in a GIS system and made available to our students and a larger public. In some cases, for example the valuable building-by-building survey by the Chicago Commission on Landmarks, we have tentative approval to put their data sheets on-line as soon as we secure funding. Negotiations with other agencies will undoubtedly take considerable time, but it is in the interests of everyone to standardize data about land and property around a common GIS system, and the University of Illinois is in a good position to take the lead on this effort. We would like to start this effort with this funding.
This proposal supports two activities essential to building the proposed system: the development of the GIS-based indexing system which will manage the interconnection of the different forms of data and the continuing acquisition, archiving and web-based presentation of images and textual material on the built environment of the Chicago area. The materials will have immediate use in university courses in history, geography, sociology, art history, architecture and urban planning. In addition we foresee a much larger potential audience. For example, the City Design Center has agreed to participate in a major project by the Chicago Teachers' Center of Northeastern Illinois University that aims at working with Chicago middle school teachers in making a curriculum about the built environment of Chicago for their classes. The City Design Center will manage their website and make available to them material from the Chicago Architecture website that is part of the Chicago Imagebase Project funded last year. Major funding from the NEH for this project is pending. This A.L.T.H.E. grant would provide equipment and digital storage for the memory-intensive images, release time for faculty in the GIS projects in Anthropology and Urban Policy and Planning, and in the Chicago Imagebase project of Art History, part-time administrator "rental" from the City Design Center, and significant student-worker hours for the purpose of scanning images, digitizing information, and indexing.
This proposal is built upon our experience in developing the Chicago Imagebase project. Over the past 6 months, we have succeeded in developing a large and quickly expanding archive of visual materials related to the Chicago area built environment, and developed two very different "interfaces" for the materials. One is directed strictly to University students taking a specific course in the department-- AH122, Chicago Architecture (See http://www.uic.edu:80/depts/ahaa/classes/ah122). This web page enables students in this class to "look at" Chicago's built environment in a variety of ways. They can access collections of images, with attached information pages, on a standard index of Chicago architects and significant buildings-- from Daniel Burnham to Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Commonwealth Edison substation on Block 37 to the State of Illinois Building. This material is based primarily on the extensive slide collection held by the Slide Library at the College of Architecture. In addition, students can access historical documents, in particular rare books, engravings, and archival materials on an era-by-era basis and can also access an "imagemap" of the downtown Loop that enables them to look at the buildings on individual blocks, and view as well the projects done by their fellow students, each of whom has been researching a block in the downtown. The web pages give students an entirely new and more open way to review for exams, provide visual references for papers, and expand their knowledge by accessing many more views than might be seen in class.
The second Imagemap entry-point is a public web page intended for a broader audience (see http://www.uic.edu/~pbhales/imagebas.html). Currently the page enables the visitor to access most of the Imagebase materials. Excluded are materials strictly related to the class and any images for which specific permission has not been secured. Copyright is a major problem in the project. We are approaching it using a very conservative stance on fair use.
The devising of this double-entry database of images has clarified for us the ways in which the Internet-based graphic interface, with its hypertext linking system, can be easily customized to provide access to the resources of the Imagebase for a wide variety of users. At the same time, the variety of users requesting access to the Imagebase, and their wide range of purposes, has made clear the need for a more complex and transparent indexing system to lie behind the Internet interface. In addition, the nature of the requests indicates to us that the next step lies with vastly expanding the scope and the type of information accessible through this indexing system. Planners, for example, are interested in seeing census data on a block by block basis; we offer them the opportunity to link that information to block-footprint aerial views of the neighborhood so that they can identify the buildings on that block, and images of the individual buildings on that block as well. This process can move in the other direction as well-- architectural historians and preservationists, and students in those fields need to think in terms of text-based and quantitative data as well as visual knowledge.
A key issue in building the geographic image database is the creation of a graphical indexing system which will ease information input and retrieval as well as allow for dynamic presentation and analysis of data. A number of web-based systems exist. However, these systems either use complex sets of hypertext links to attach data to map images (see for example http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/vt/chicago.html) or rely on specialized software (see http://www.mapquest.com or http://maps.esri.com) requiring an extensive amount of labor-intensive programming. Moreover, these systems limit users to a small menu of predetermined ways of searching, analyzing, and displaying data. A solution to this problem is to organize information using existing GIS software. ArcView, a leading GIS desktop mapping system, is used in the Anthropology Department and Geography Program, the Urban Planning Program, and the City Design Center. ArcView features powerful data display, analysis, and update capabilities. In addition, many GIS maps and data sets exist in ArcView formats and therefore working within an Arcview environment will allow the integration of many existing data sets. At present, software to link Arcview files to the Internet is in the development stage and our contact with the company indicates that new GIS/Internet software will be available in the next 6 to 12 months. We will work closely with software developers so that our indexing system is compatible and can be made immediately operational.
During the grant year, images and other data will be organized using GIS maps of target areas in the Loop and the Near West Side. Faculty and students in the Geography and Urban Planning programs will build the maps and create the necessary links to the database. The project will be immediately useful to students in Geography 481 (GIS I), and Urban Planning 502 (Introduction to GIS), and a new course in Methods of Planning who would help build the necessary maps and use the database for exercises. In this way, not only will the information be useful to students, but students will learn the process of building and organizing the maps and data sets. Once created, students in many Geography and Planning courses could use this information to study spatial analysis and other planning issues and techniques.
This grant will enable us to devise and develop a permanent instructional resource that will regularly be used by at least four academic programs at UIC; Art History, Architecture, Urban Planning, and Geography. We expect the system to change the way students study course material and prepare research papers. The system will also be a major resource for the multi-disciplinary research program being developed at the City Design Center. And, as illustrated by the teacher training project, we are confident there will be interest in and use of the system by others. For example, one of our next projects will be to make this systme available to community-based organzations that have already been linked to the Internet and UIC's computer system through another UIC program. No system like this currently exists since the software effectively linking GIS and the Internet is only now approaching release. Thus, we expect this to be an original application of technology in education.
May 15 to August 15 Development and testing of the geographic indexing system Development and testing of software providing a GIS-Internet interface Continued expansion of the image archives
August 15 to December 15 Introduction of the GIS system and expanded image archives to courses in Urban Planning, Geography, and Art History